


The Forest Primeval

by plutosrose



Category: Hemlock Grove
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Minor Character Death, Olivia's terribleness, Police, References to Past Canonical Rape/Non Con
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-16
Updated: 2020-08-06
Packaged: 2021-03-03 03:22:16
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 14
Words: 27,559
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24218080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plutosrose/pseuds/plutosrose
Summary: A different event sets Roman on the path to becoming upir.
Relationships: Roman Godfrey/Peter Rumancek
Comments: 32
Kudos: 86





	1. Taken

“You have to stay here,” Peter said, wading through the debris and ground water that has come up like bile strewn around the old Godfrey steel mill.

“No. Do you ever get tired of trying to talk me out of this?” Roman asked as he kept in step with Peter. “I’m coming with you.” He’d gotten arrested for Peter. He’d deflected the blame and allowed him to escape unscathed. There was no way in hell that he was going to abandon the most exciting thing that had happened in Hemlock Grove in a long time simply because Peter told him to.

“You’re not going to be able to keep up with me once I shift,” Peter pointed out, and Roman utterly despised the fact that that makes complete sense. So far, he hadn’t tried to talk to Peter about the voices that he can hear, the ones that give him hints about how to sway people to do things he wants them to or the way that he can see people’s thoughts floating around inside their mind. Even though Peter’s shown him his secret, Roman is pretty confident that if he reveals his, Peter won’t believe him or worse, will tell him to make an appointment with his uncle. 

Because as far as he knows, those voices don’t give him the ability to run as fast as Peter can when he sheds his skin and becomes a wolf.

“You should stay here, actually,” Peter takes a few steps away from him, only stopping when he’s discovered a clear path that stretches as far as either of them can see. “That way, once I finish tracking it, I can find you.”

This sounds even worse than trying to keep up with Peter in wolf form. “Fine, I’ll stay here,” Roman acquiesced, which Peter recognized wasn’t an easy thing for him. Godfreys, after all, are not exactly used to being told what to do when they practically have the run of Hemlock Grove, both officially, and unofficially.

Peter nodded. “Okay. I’ll track him, and then I’ll meet you back here.” He looked around for a moment, absorbing any details that he could about the path that would lead back to Roman - the criss-crossed steel pipes - the thin river of water that zigzagged underneath their feet. 

Easy.

Roman’s gaze follows Peter as far as he can. He spots Peter peel off his shirt, before disappearing behind a column. 

That’s when he hears the snarl and dark fur that he recognizes as Peter. He can’t stop himself from thinking that the change is beautiful. As much as Peter wanted to protect him - handle the werewolf himself - he finds himself wishing that he’d been able to watch him change again. 

And then he hears a growl - and a snarl - that he doesn’t recognize. He can feel the adrenaline rise in his chest as he locks the thought about Peter away for the moment. The vargulf is here, and they’re close. Hell, maybe Peter was right. Maybe he was just slowing them down since he couldn’t run as fast as the werewolf could.

He craned his neck to try and get a better look. 

And it’s at that moment that he hears the hiss through the air, and the sharp puncture of metal on flesh. Even though he’s distinctly aware of the fact that they’re trespassing (as the police officers reminded him, while he reminded him that the Godfrey name on the door technically meant this was his property), and should be somewhat quiet, he can’t stop himself.

“Peter?!” His heart thundered in his chest as he leapt over debris and stomped through puddles to try and reach him. The horrifying thought that Peter might be dead suddenly rises to the top of his mind, and it occurs to him that in the short amount of time that he’s spent with Peter, he’s begun to forget what life is like without him. 

Peter’s crumpled wolf form comes into view, and Roman’s heart feels like it’s stopped in his chest. 

“Stay right there!”

Like the last time that they’d cased the mill together, he has let his guard down by focusing singularly on Peter and their investigation. He put his hands up as the woman (whom for a brief moment he thinks he recognizes - was she on the property having a conversation with his mother?), shoves a weapon in his face.

He watched as she nudged Peter’s body with her foot. “Don’t!” he snapped. Anger starts to rise inside of him, and he can’t stand the way that she’s disrespecting him - treating him like an animal. 

Usually, the whispers that he hears are nothing more than that. Whispers. He can’t always make out words, but sometimes he can hear one or two. Enough to nudge him in the right direction - to show him what he needs to do in order to make someone do what he wants. 

But now, he can make out entire sentences in the darkness. ‘Tell her to leave town,’ the voices tell him. ‘Tell her that she won’t remember who Peter is, or who you are. You can make her do that.’ 

In that moment, he decided that he needed to figure out a way to meet her gaze. To reach inside of her mind and see those thoughts. He can do it - after all, now she’s lowered the weapon to bind Peter’s legs together with zip ties. 

He couldn’t stop himself from feeling a sudden wave of humiliation when this woman actually goes as far to muzzle him. 

“It’s not him! The vargulf, it’s not him,” he pleads, thinking this is the one chance that he has to try and make her do what she wants.

But she’s unmoved. When he takes a step closer, she swivels quickly and puts the gun in his face again. “Eyes on the ground,” she says sharply. “I don’t want to have to shoot you.” 

“Please,” Roman pleads again, hands in the air and eyes on the ground. “It’s not him. Please don’t take him.” Humiliation has now given way to desperation. Peter might not be dead, but this is ten times worse, because now, he knows that he’s helpless to stop this woman from taking him.

For a moment, she regards him with sympathy, before heaving Peter over her shoulder. “Trust me kid,” she says gently. “This thing is not your friend. I’m sorry. But your friend is gone. This is a killer.” 

The Godfrey name cannot stop her from taking Peter away.


	2. Key

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Olivia hands Roman a key.

Roman isn’t sure how he was able to make it home. After he had gotten back in his car, he had alternated between screaming and sobbing so hard that it was almost difficult to see the road. He turned on the music as loud as it would go, simply because he couldn’t stand to listen to himself.

When he gets home, he parks the car, and rests his forehead on the steering wheel. The longer he sits there, the more he tries to figure out if he could have stopped the woman. Had she tailed them all the way to the mill? Maybe if he hadn’t been arguing with Peter about whether he should have been there to begin with, he would have given him enough time to escape.

The lights are on at the house, although he’s certain that Shelley has gone to bed by now. Cautiously, he approaches the front door, and upon stepping inside, he comes face-to-face with Olivia.

“Don’t fucking talk to me,” he snaps, before storming past her and locking himself in the first-floor bathroom. Anger, desperation, humiliation, and regret all crash into each other as he curls up against the door, trying to muffle the sound of his sobs.

“Darling,” came Olivia’s voice, quiet and pleading. Roman can’t think of a moment where he’s hated his mother more, even though she’s said nothing, even though she’s done nothing, but continue to stand by the door. 

“Did I tell you to fucking talk to me? Don’t you have to go get high in your bedroom or some shit?” He’s seen the little vials of clear liquid that Olivia has tried to sneak into the house, and although he doesn’t know what it is, he was pretty confident that it wasn’t anything that had been prescribed at the institute. 

“Open the door, Roman,” she said more firmly. He let out a shaky breath, and hastily wiped his face. Maybe if he opened the door and she saw him, even for just a few seconds, then she would decide that it wasn’t worth her time to bother him anymore.

He stood up and opened the door. “What.” It’s not a question - it’s a challenge to take up more of his time. 

Olivia steps closer, placing a hand against his cheek. “My darling, please tell me what’s wrong. What do you need?” 

Roman sniffled, the last thing that he wanted for that evening was to round it out with crying in front of his mother. It is hard to maintain his composure when he can still see the woman’s face; can still see Peter being bound like an animal.

“Peter,” he murmured weakly, turning away from her to grip the edges of the sink. “Peter, he’s gone.”

The words are so quiet that Olivia has to ask him to repeat them. Instead, he takes the expensive glass soap bottle next to him and throws it, as hard as he can at the wall above the bathtub. Olivia doesn’t jump as the glass shatters and rains down into the tub. 

“He’s gone!” Roman doesn’t want to raise his voice, but it’s hard not to, when this cocktail of anger is inside him, ready to explode. There are footsteps upstairs.

Olivia folds her arms. “Please keep your voice down.” In that moment, focusing on Shelley is the only thing that makes him feel remotely level. “Tell me what happened.”

His resolve not to cry in front of Olivia is suddenly breaking, and he feels like he’s coming apart as he grips the sink. “Some woman….some woman took him. Took Peter. Said he was the killer.”

Olivia is circling him now in a way that reminds him of the vultures at the pier. He furrowed his brow and tried to push the thought away, because the pier makes him think of driving around town with Peter.

“Is Peter the killer?”

It’s such a ridiculous question that he nearly snaps at her, but now that his tears are running down his cheeks, he can feel every wall that he’s put up between him and his mother over the years breaking down. It’s almost enough to make him feel light-headed.

“No,” he whimpered. “No, Peter….Peter couldn’t hurt anything. Or anyone.” The only reason that Peter had been out chasing the vargulf in the first place was to protect other people. That was just what Peter did - think of others. He didn’t hurt them. 

Olivia peered at him curiously. “He would have left you, had he not been taken,” she said coolly. Roman is certain that there is something she isn’t telling him, but then again, that’s a feeling that he’s had his entire life. 

“No, no, I’m not doing this. I am not talking to you about Peter,” he shot back, knuckles turning white as he tries to steady his breath. He wipes away the tears a second time. “Just get the fuck out. I’ll just…”

The words died on his tongue. He isn’t sure how to go about getting Peter back, frankly. He had never seen the woman before, and she was so quick with her gun that Roman thought a rescue attempt might end with a bullet between the eyes. That was, if he was able to track her down. Unfortunately, she didn’t leave him with much of an indication of where she was going. 

Olivia nodded slowly, retreating for a moment. He isn’t sure how long she’s gone (because at this point, he has slumped against the sink, overwhelmed by the impossibility of getting Peter back. Of making things right). 

But when she returned, she said nothing, placing the razor that he kept in his room down on the edge of the sink. 

“You have one choice,” is the only thing that she says as he looks at her over his shoulder. 

As she retreats further into the house, he picks up the razor. “You hear them too,” he said suddenly, “the voices.” 

Olivia stops, turns, and smiles. “I’ve handed you a key, darling. Use it wisely.”


	3. Fountain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Roman finds Peter.

He isn't dead long enough to have any profound epiphanies about the afterlife.

When he woke up, everything is too bright. Too loud. There’s a dull, rhythmic thud in his ears, that repeats over and over again. It took him a few seconds to realize that these thuds are people’s heartbeats.

He took a deep gulp of air, and examined his arms, which had a few seconds ago been covered in blood. Now, nothing. Nothing but thin scars that had healed so rapidly he could barely see them, despite the damage he’d done to his skin.

And those voices - those whispers that before, he had barely understood, they were clearer now too.

The ‘key’ that his mother had given him hadn’t given him enough context to understand exactly what those voices were, but he understood enough. He knew that most people couldn’t hear them. He understood that being able to listen to them - follow their advice - meant that he had unlocked some kind of special power. It made him strong.

And it was going to be exactly how he got Peter back.

It isn’t a voice that tells him how to find Peter, although in retrospect, that would have been incredibly helpful and useful.

Instead, it’s that dull, rhythmic heartbeat. When he squeezed his eyes shut and focused, he could tell that each heartbeat is not the same, much like beats in songs are not always the same.

But how to tell how to find the woman who had found them in the mill? Or Peter? Sniff them out like a dog?

He smiled weakly to himself and thought that he might have to tell that one to Peter later.

If he can find him, that is.

When he found him, he corrected himself. He already flung himself on the floor. He already cried. Now was the time for action.

It’s a stupid idea, he thought, but it was the best one that he had. He decided to get back on the road and drive to the Godfrey Steel Mill - there was probably something about the place that will help him find Peter, even if he isn’t entirely certain about what he’s looking for yet.

But then, as he started to head toward the garage, he hesitated. His car was flashy and difficult to hide, and the roads of Hemlock Grove are quiet past eight o’clock at night. The last thing he needed was for some idiot to see his license plate when he was trying to rescue Peter.

On his way to rescue, he reminded himself.

But what’s he supposed to do instead? Walk all the way to the steel mill? It’s at least a few miles, and with each passing second, he’s growing more anxious to track down Peter and the woman who took him.

That’s when it dawns on him.

He was different now.

If his mother really was like him - and always seemed to turn up wherever she was or wasn’t wanted without calling attention to herself, surely he would be able to do the same thing, right?

It was hard for him to tell if he was really stronger or faster now, but he thinks that he must be, because he moved through the shadowy woods much faster on foot than he remembered being able to in the daytime. Maybe this is some sort of weird new power he has, maybe he’s feeling more energetic because holy hell, he definitely just managed to cheat death, or maybe he’s moving faster because he’s full of adrenaline, and the only thing that’s on his mind right now is Peter. Peter. Peter. Must Save Peter. Peter. Peter. Peter.

He reached the mill for the second time that night, and bizarrely, he feels frustrated and annoyed that he’s the only one there. Those fuckers in the Hemlock Police Department were swarming out there when they were just scoping out the area in the daytime, and now that a real crime has occurred (because trespassing on his own property is not a crime, no matter what his mother thinks), the property is abandoned.

It felt surprisingly easy to pry open the heavy doors without Peter’s help. Idly, he also felt a little disappointed that he didn’t have the opportunity to really test out what feels like his new strength on the lock, because they’d already made quick work of it from their previous trips to the steel mill.

The steel mill had been gross earlier that night, and Roman had needed to take care to ensure that he didn’t step on a dead rat or in runoff that he suspected might have been connected in some way to the city’s sewer system.

But now the smell was overwhelming - it’s not just the stale air or the smell of dead animals that’s irritating him, it’s as though he can smell every person who has ever set foot in the building. He gagged several times, gripping his wrist so tightly that the skin threatens to bleed as he forces himself to look for clues. Anything - really, anything, that might help him find Peter.

And then, his heart feels like it’s stopped beating in his chest for the second time that night. It’s surprisingly easy for him to find the spot in the mill where Peter fell, because there’s blood there. He isn’t sure if the blood is fresh or not, because time seems bizarrely immaterial to him now. Insignificant.

But he can smell it - in fact, there’s nothing that he’s ever smelled like this in his entire life. It’s sweet, it’s bitter, it smells like iron and it smells like warmth and sun at the same time.

In fact, he’s unable to stop himself as he collapses to his knees, licking the spot on the concrete where the blood has dried.

When he scrambled to his feet, he’s disgusted with himself, and he wiped his mouth as delicately as he could with the sleeve of his coat.

The drops of blood are enough and too much at the same time. A taste has only magnified the reality that it is blood that he needs. And yet, it’s enough for him to focus. This is the blood that matters.

He moved quickly through the shadows, picking up Peter’s trail along a winding street that leads out of Hemlock Grove. He isn’t quite sure how long he followed them through the winding, dark roads. Time seemed, to him, to have contracted and expanded at the same time. It isn’t long (at least, to him) before the blood gets even stronger, signaling that he’s close.

Indeed, he’s just spotted a van, with Fish and Wildlife painted on the side of it. He can’t - doesn’t know the best way to stop it, because he’s been making this up as he goes along.

So he stands in front of it.

To his surprise, the van skidded to a halt, and the driver’s side opened.

Whatever sympathy she had for him back in the steel mill he can tell has evaporated. She raised the gun at him for the second time that night. “Eyes on the ground!”

“No.”

He stalked toward the woman, who raises the gun further until it’s pushing painfully into his sternum. He raised an eyebrow. “Go ahead,” he urges. He has already died once tonight, and he can’t help but feel just the slightest bit smug about the possibility of avoiding death a second time in a single evening.

There is an uneasy, tense silence between them. He could tell that she was looking at him cautiously, almost as if she were examining him.

“I know what you are,” she murmured, careful not to meet his gaze as she kept the gun between them. At this moment, Roman isn’t even confident that he knows entirely what he is, but he’s clinging to the inescapable fact that whatever he is is what helped him find her. What helped him find Peter.

“Yeah?” Roman asked, a hint of amusement in his voice only because the situation feels so absurd. “What am I?”

Thud.

Thud.

Her heartbeat threatens to overwhelm him. His eyes bulge as he steps impossibly closer, even though at this point, she would barely have to touch the trigger to really tear his body apart.

He rips the metal out of her hands, twisting it backward as he tosses it aside. Now, his head is throbbing so fiercely that it feels like the blood vessels in his head have contorted in on themselves. The pain in his head is so bad that he almost forgets that he can see, and he has to force himself to remember that he can see out of his eyes.

She brandishes the crucifix necklace she’s wearing like a weapon, but that doesn’t do anything but frankly, mildly amuse him.

“What?” he laughed. “Do you think I’m fucking Dracula or some shit?”

Even from a distance, he could see the veins pulsing under her skin.

“Stay back,” she warned.

She had to have another gun, right? Something loaded with silver or whatever kills people like him. There’s really only a split second - although in Roman’s head, it felt impossibly longer - where he has to contemplate the fact that maybe she could actually kill him.

He lunged and sunk teeth into her skin. His teeth cut through her skin so smoothly that he’s able to find that vein that he saw moments ago easily.

But, he doesn’t stop there. Blood spurts from the wound on her neck, and Roman laps it up, before plunging his teeth into her skin over and over and over again. He tells himself that it’s revenge for her having taken Peter, but even in that moment, he knows deep down that it isn’t revenge.

He’s hungry.

Finally, her muscles stop twitching. And the blood, which had sprung up out of her veins like a fountain, has become nothing more than a trickle.

His headache is gone.

There is blood covering his hands, the expensive peacoat, and his face. He tries to wipe off the blood, but there’s so much of the woman’s blood on him that he probably has just wiped more on himself.

He ripped open the back doors to the van and found Peter there, in human form now. “What the hell?” he started, before his gaze wandered to the woman’s body on the ground.

He sighed, before smiling reassuringly at Peter, who is gaping at him. And in the short time that he’s known him, he’s never known Peter to be made speechless.

“I need a fucking cigarette,” he laughs. The reality of the body next to him not quite dawning on him yet.

“Yeah…” Peter started again, blinking and wide-eyed. “Well, I don’t exactly have any at the moment.” He gestures to the cage around him.

There’s something wrong in his tone, Roman thought. He furrows his brow, but he can’t identify what it is. Together, they are able to force the lock open. Roman notes that the woman must have given him a blanket, because he has it wrapped around his torso, now. 

“I’ve got you,” he murmured to Peter, scooping him up into his arms.

He was expecting some retort. Something sarcastic like ‘my hero’ or maybe something more serious, like Peter telling him that he would have been able to escape on his own. Or that he could certainly stand on his own, despite being confined to the cage.

Peter, who seems rather unselfconscious in that moment, peers at him quizzically, as though he can tell that his heartbeat is clearly audible to him. A steady, unrelenting rhythm.

He doesn’t react to the woman on the floor (although this would come later). Instead, he presses a hand against Roman’s cheek, the contact feeling unnaturally warm to Roman.

“Roman,” he said slowly, eyes full of concern as he searched his face. “What did you do?”


	4. Fish and Wildlife

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Roman and Peter head home.

It was abundantly clear that the woman was dead, and now, fear was beginning to rise inside of him. He hugged Peter close to his heart, as though his presence was the only thing anchoring him at the moment. 

Peter smelled like warm earth, he thought, but he didn’t have much of a desire to bite him. He could still see the blood traveling through the veins underneath his skin, and Roman wondered if the only reason that he didn’t want to bite him was because he had already fed on someone. 

“Jesus Christ, Roman, you can put me down.” 

Peter’s voice is the only thing that brings him back to reality. When Peter’s feet hit the pavement, he wrapped the blanket more securely around his waist and peered down at the woman’s body. 

Roman took this moment to fumble through his pockets, looking for a stray cigarette. “You still haven’t told me what you did,” Peter reminded him. 

Finding a cigarette, he held it between his lips as he met Peter’s gaze. He didn’t like the way that Peter was studying him - the way that he was waiting for an answer, and indeed, the way, to Roman, that he didn’t seem grateful that he had done what needed to be done in order to rescue him from that woman who had stuffed him into a cage in the back of a van like he was some sort of runaway dog.

“You know, you could be a little more grateful,” Roman said, swearing loudly when he realized that he didn’t have his lighter in his pocket. 

He still wasn’t certain how far or how long he had travelled, but now that the sun was coming up, it was becoming increasingly likely that someone would drive by their spot on the road, and then Hemlock’s finest, or assholes from whatever fucking police department was closest, would descend on them like vultures. 

He tried to ignore the anxiety that was welling up inside of him, because beyond rescuing Peter, he had truly had no plan - he had certainly not planned on killing the woman who had taken Peter, although he had certainly felt angry enough to have the thought pass through his mind, even before he had crossed that thin line between life and death. 

“You have to call your mom,” Peter said suddenly, giving Roman a concerned look. Roman made a face. The last thing that he wanted to do ever was call his mother. 

“Why do I need to call that miserable cunt?” he grunted, fumbling through his pockets to see if he had thought to bring his phone. 

Peter looked at him, wide-eyed and in disbelief. “Do you want to wait here until someone drives by and explain why we’re standing next to a half-eaten corpse?”

Roman winced. “I didn’t eat her,” he shot back. He was silent for a moment as he poked the woman’s body with his foot. “Why do you keep asking what I did anyway?”

The question hung in the air after Roman had spoken, and Peter felt a knot form in his stomach. He had always known what Roman was, but had deliberately kept it from him. He might have disobeyed his mother’s original demand to stay away from the Godfreys, but there was no way in hell that he was going to be the one responsible for unleashing an upir on a sleepy little Pennsylvania town - vargulf, or no vargulf.

He wasn’t sure why he had to ask - he was well aware that the fact that Roman had been able to find him - by seemingly just walking when he had to be miles outside of town - meant that he was fully upir, now. In fact, the only reason that he could think of was that he wanted to know if Roman had truly changed. If becoming fully upir - in full position of his powers, rather than having them lie dormant, had made him someone entirely different. 

But that wasn’t exactly easy to put into words, not when Roman was staring him down, his large eyes fixed on him as he waited for an answer. He found himself wondering if Roman would leave him there, on the side of the road, with the van, and the cage, and the woman’s dead body.

“Did you know?” Roman asked quietly. “What I was.”

Peter gave him an incredulous look. “We need to get out of here, Roman. You need to call your mom. Maybe she has a phone.” 

Peter gestured to the woman, who was lying on the pavement with her eyes open. Roman made a face. “You don’t have one?” 

Peter blinked at him. “Yes, because all werewolves carry cell phones with them when they shift. Christ Godfrey, she’s dead.” 

He bent down and started to go through her pockets, while Roman stood guard. At least, Peter liked to think that was what he was doing, because the last thing that he wanted was to get arrested for murder half-naked on a highway with Roman Godfrey. 

It didn’t take long for him to find her phone, and he pressed it into Roman’s palm. “Call her,” he insisted. 

“Can’t we just,” Roman started, looking down at the phone as though it was an insect. “Drive back? Can’t the cops detect weird phone calls and shit?”   
Peter sighed and rubbed his face. “What do you suggest we do, then?”

Roman shrugged. “We could drive back?”

“Because you driving a van that says Fish and Wildlife is totally normal.”

“Have about three of them in the garage back home,” Roman quipped, cracking a smile. “Besides, what is calling my mom going to do?” He waved the phone around. “It’s going to take time for her to get here, and then someone would notice the van, and they’d notice the body, and they’d notice my mom’s car. That’s a lot to cover up.” 

“So is trying not to be noticed driving a van that says Fish and Wildlife all the way back to Hemlock Grove,” Peter shot back. “Do you even know where the hell we are?” 

“Do you?”

“I was kind of in a cage without any windows.”

They were getting nowhere, and every few seconds that ticked by made it more likely that someone would spot them and call the police. They were both quiet for a moment, before Roman spoke.

“We can put her body in the back of the van. There are no windows there. And then we can drop the van in the woods somewhere,” Roman said, and Peter shrugged. He had to admit, they weren’t going to be able to do much better - any plan they had for getting back home was full of risks that could end up putting them in prison. 

So off they went, Roman driving, and Peter hunched down as far as he could, scrolling through the woman’s phone to navigate them back to Hemlock Grove. 

They had gone about ten miles in complete silence when Roman repeated his earlier question. “Did you know?”

“Roman…” Peter started, biting his lip. “I’m not sure that you want to get into this.”

“Just tell me, yes or no. Did you know?”

“...Yes,” Peter said simply, and Roman couldn’t help but feel angry. Peter had shown him his secret, and yet had actively kept his secret to himself at the same time. In a way, it felt like a betrayal. He gripped the steering wheel tightly and bit his lip so hard that it was threatening to bleed. 

“You have to understand,” Peter added. “Your kind, and mine...we don’t get along.” He pursed his lips.

“What...were you expecting us to go full Edward versus Jacob?” Roman asked tersely, and it was hard for Peter to stop himself from smiling. 

“No,” Peter shook his head. “But...my grandfather, Nicolae. He was like me. When he was little, his family was rounded up by Nazis. One of them - he was upir too. He tried to make Nicolae’s grandmother kill him.” 

Roman blinked, expressionless as he stared ahead at the road. “So...I’m a Nazi.” This wasn’t an accusatory question. Peter furrowed his brow, wondering if Roman had decided that there must have been something inherently evil about himself. 

“You’re not a Nazi,” Peter added, but Roman shook his head.

“But I’m something,” he murmured, “All I wanted was to protect you. I did it to protect you. Get you back. What I did to that woman. Humans don’t do that.”

The admission that Roman had crossed over for him hit him hard, in a way that he wasn’t expecting. It was almost as though Roman had admitted that he loved him, although he hadn’t quite said the words. 

“You did it for me?” he repeated, thinking that there was no way that Destiny wasn’t going to have a field day over this, if he told her. 

“Of course,” Roman said, his knuckles turning white from gripping the steering wheel. “You would do it too.” 

Peter smiled slightly, and it was then that he wondered if maybe Roman did not have to be like other upir. 

When Roman pulled the van off into the woods, he grabbed the phone out of Peter’s hands. 

And yet, he didn’t have to call his mother, because she was standing several yards away, among the trees. His eyes widened, and he wanted to demand to know how she knew where they’d be, but as he got out of the van, his energy was starting to wane. 

He wondered if she knew.

“Darling,” Olivia said, taking in the sight of Peter, who was still wrapped in the blanket from the woman’s van, and him (he hadn’t noticed yet, but when he’d next step in front of a mirror, he’d notice that he looked strangely pale and almost feverish). 

If Roman wasn’t mistaken, she almost looked concerned. 

“I did what needed to be done,” Roman said simply. He could feel his mother’s eyes travel across him, noting every bloodstain that he hadn’t been able to wipe away on the trip back home. 

Olivia glanced through the open door of the van, noticing the blood - and the lifeless body inside. “Go,” she said, putting a hand on Roman’s shoulder. “I’ll take care of it. The important thing is, you’re safe.” 

Roman eyed her curiously for a moment, because it really did seem like she was concerned in that moment. Or maybe she was just concerned about the bad publicity that Godfrey Industries would receive if he was convicted of murder. 

His mother’s words to him last night had left more questions than answers, but frankly, now wasn’t the time for any of them. And if he had to be totally honest, he didn’t have a better plan for taking care of the body. If his mother could make it disappear, maybe he could trust her. 

“Come on,” Roman said, putting an arm protectively around Peter. Peter was beginning to feel exhaustion set in too, so he allowed it, and decided to think about what the gesture meant later.

The ground was uneven under his feet, and every so often he cursed under his breath when he stepped on a particularly sharp twig or rock. “You got a story for why someone might see us out here?” Peter asked, a hint of amusement in his voice.

“Sure,” Roman said, grinning toothily in a way that sent a shiver up Peter’s spine. “I’ll just tell them I wanted to see what it would be like to fuck a werewolf in its natural habitat.” 

Peter reached out to shove him, and Roman laughed. It was nice to have one moment that was overcome with seriousness. 

It didn’t last.

“Does Letha know what happened?” Peter asked, “Did you talk to her last night, before you came to find me?”

Roman’s expression hardened, and he shook his head. They didn’t speak again until they reached the manor.

~ 

Once his mother had called Peter’s mother to assure her that Peter was okay (and Peter had changed into some of his old clothes, which he had professed ‘made him look like a professional asshole’), the two of them had been confined to the Godfrey manor to wait out what felt like a coming storm. Roman was beginning to feel an uncontrollable itchiness under his skin - was this how the hunger had started? Truthfully, he couldn’t quite remember, other than the feeling of intense satisfaction that he’d felt when he’d sunk his teeth into the woman’s skin.

“Fuck, I’m so bored,” Roman grumbled, flopping down on the couch in the living room. 

“Better in here bored than out there,” Peter pointed out as he flipped through a magazine, and Roman made a face. “Unless your mom really does handle things, the cops are going to be on both of us.” 

“If I really am what you said I am, then, can’t I just make them not think you’re killing those girls?” Roman asked aloud, tracing shapes on the ceiling with the cigarette that he had just grabbed off the table. “Make them think that it’s really just a wolf or that, I don’t know….the murderer left town a week ago and he’s in Canada right now.” 

Peter rolled his eyes. “You can’t just compel everyone. Someone’s bound not to fall for it.” The woman in the steel mill hadn’t, for example, she had known exactly what Roman was, and had tried to take as many precautions as possible. 

Roman opened his mouth - likely to insist that this was exactly what he could do - when there was a knock at the door. For a moment, they were both silent. 

But the knocking just got louder and more insistent, and then whoever was at the door switched to banging on the doorbell, which sent a cacophony of excessively cheerful chiming throughout the house. 

Roman got to his feet first, and then looked back at Peter. With his mother at Godfrey Industries for the day, and Shelley upstairs, he was suddenly full of the same heroic impulse that had made him decide to try and rescue Peter. If that woman had been after him, then there were probably other people who wanted to take him away just as badly. 

“Hide,” he demanded, and Peter nodded, ducking behind the couch and crawling away. 

“Hemlock PD, open up!”

He went to the front foyer and cracked the door open an inch to see a police officer - one of the ones who had arrested him, in fact - smirking at him. “Is there something that I can help you with, officer?” 

“We’re investigating the disappearance of Clementine Chasseur,” he said, puffing out his chest in a way that Roman thought was meant to try and blind him with his police officer’s badge. 

“Who?”

“Cut the shit, Godfrey. Chasseur’s van was found in the woods not that far from here. What were you doing twenty-four hours ago?”

“Fucking your daughter?” 

Okay, he was well aware of the fact that he shouldn’t have said that, but with these new powers in hand, there was part of him that was starting to feel as though he was invincible. If the police department thought that they could easily drag him in like they had the last time, they had another thing coming. 

A plan formed in his mind - he would redirect the officer. He could make him pissed off at him, then he’d take him out of the house and plant the thought in his head that there was nothing at the house, not him, not Peter, nor the entire fucking Godfrey name - that was worth investigating. Easy, he thought. 

Except, as he was becoming aware, there was nothing that was easy in Hemlock Grove. 

While the officer - as he had predicted, pulled him backward with a surprising amount of force to handcuff him, he wasn’t taken outside of the house. Instead, he was shoved forward through the front door. 

Wait, he thought. Hadn’t this officer had a partner the last time that he’d seen him?

As that thought had occurred to him, an expression of horror spread across his face as he spotted the man’s partner haul Peter to his feet, also handcuffed. 

“So much for hiding,” Peter murmured, and the officer dropped him. He tried to stand up again, but the officer shoved him back to his knees. The officer behind Roman did the same. 

Blood was pulsing through their necks. Roman could see it. He could hear their heartbeats thudding in their ears, too. As much as he wanted to think that he would never hurt Peter, in that moment, he heard Peter’s heartbeat too. He needed more. 

He could hear footsteps upstairs, and he squeezed his eyes shut, trying to will Shelley to stay upstairs - and trying to will the headache to go away.

He felt the cold metal barrel of a gun press into the back of his head. “The sheriff’s daughters were killed last night, and now the nice lady from Fish and Wildlife is missing. Is this how you two get your rocks off?” the officer behind him said. 

“Like I said, fucking your daughter does that just fine.” The headache got worse as the gun was brought down in an arc, smacked against his head, and sent him to the floor. 

“Shut up Roman,” Peter hissed, and the officer behind him dug his gun into the side of his head in response. 

“Both of you, shut up,” he said, and Roman took advantage of his pause to look in the officer’s eyes. 

It wasn’t hard for him to push inside his mind, sorting through the man’s thoughts, hopes, and dreams. “Take your gun, shoot your partner. And then shoot yourself.” 

“Roman--” Peter started, and in that moment he felt afraid - but this was a different fear than he’d experienced when the woman had stuffed him into a cage in the back of her van. 

But it was too late. The officer behind Roman yelled, but the one behind Peter raised his arm and fired two shots. He crumpled on the floor.

Then, another shot, and the man behind him collapsed. 

“I meant what I said,” Roman said, jerking his handcuffs apart and finding a key on one of the officers’ bodies to unlock his. “About protecting you.” 

Looking at the bodies of the two officers, Peter wondered if he was the one that needed protecting.


	5. Go

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They need to go.

Peter hadn’t stopped staring at the police officers for the past five minutes. Roman, for his part, looked as though he was feverish, desperately clutching at a table that Peter was fairly certain was worth more than the contents of the trailer where he and his mom lived several times over. 

“They’re dead,” Peter said, for about the third time in those five minutes. Roman still looks like he might throw up, and he’s pretty certain at this point that he’s scratching and clawing at that table to stop himself from feeding again.

Oh hell, feeding.

Right now, this looked like an accident. A very suspicious accident, but an accident nonetheless, and maybe if they waited for Roman’s mom to get back, she could fix this too. 

Oh hell, how was anyone supposed to fix this? Destiny was going to kill him. That was, unless his mother didn’t kill him first. 

“I know they’re fucking dead!” Roman shot back, sinking to his knees and wrapping his arms tightly around the table’s leg. 

Peter furrowed his brow and took a deep breath, running a hand through his hair. He was trying to take some deep breaths - maybe steady himself.

“And for fuck’s sake, make your heart stop beating like that!”

This statement from Roman caught him off guard. He turned away from the officers for the first time since they’d died - or more accurately, been killed, and approached Roman cautiously. 

He was shaking badly, and desperately trying to inch away from Peter. “I said to make your heart stop beating like that.” Now the statement is less aggressive, and more pleading. For a moment, Peter wondered if Roman actually would forget that they were friends, and feed on him until he was little more than a hollowed out, bleeding shell of a person like the woman had been when she died.

That’s exactly what Destiny would tell him, he thought. And his mother. Upir would kill him and feed on him the moment they had the chance, and they sure as hell wouldn’t apologize for doing so. 

“No, no, no, no,” he could hear Roman murmuring under his breath.

He hesitated for a moment, before drawing closer to Roman and wrapping his arms around him. “It’s okay,” he murmured. “You’re okay.” 

What the hell did someone tell an upir on the verge of a full-on breakdown, anyway? 

“You shouldn’t,” Roman breathed against his skin. He could feel him digging his fingers into his shirt.

“Yeah, well too fucking bad,” he murmured, holding Roman tightly. 

Roman could smell his blood - and it was infinitely stronger than when he'd found it on the concrete in the steel mill. It was strong, earthy, and warm. He reflexively bared his teeth, which were close to sinking down into Peter's skin when Peter squeezed his shoulder.

"Don't," he said gently. There was no way that he could think about what they were supposed to do if he was left unconscious because Roman had lost control and decided to feed on him too.

Or kill him.

He felt guilty for even thinking about it. He didn’t think that Roman the person was capable of murder, but frankly, as Destiny and his mother would no doubt remind him, there wasn’t much of a limit to what Roman the upir was capable of.

And that included tearing him open and sucking him completely dry, until he was nothing but a shell of muscle and bone. 

Roman, for his part, had honestly half-expected Peter to tell him that he'd rip his teeth out if he bit him. He certainly could in werewolf form. He didn’t say anything for several seconds, and instead relaxed against him. 

“You have to go,” Roman murmured weakly against his neck. “Please.” 

Destiny would have told him he had to go. His mother probably would have told him the same thing. He had a feeling that if he let go of Roman, that he would dart across the room and sink his teeth into those men until there was nothing left. 

The terrified look that had been in the woman’s eyes as Roman had punctured her skin over and over until there was practically nothing left was still burned into his mind.

Not that he would tell Roman that. He had a feeling it wouldn’t be terribly helpful.

“I’m not leaving,” Peter murmured back, clenching his jaw and silently praying for Olivia to return as quickly as possible. If the entire Hemlock Police Department wasn’t about to descend on this house, he really didn’t think any of them deserved to be police officers.

And he was a lot to fairly confident that spinning them a story about how one of the cops completely lost it and shot his partner and then himself wouldn’t exactly be believed by people who were clearly waiting for him to appear back in town so they could arrest him.

It wasn’t that they actually believed that he was a werewolf, he thought. It was that he was Romani in the whitest town that he’d ever had the misfortune to end up in.

As he tried to think of a plan, the noise that he’d heard upstairs started getting louder. Roman had mentioned earlier that Shelley was upstairs - probably reading or writing, and yet, there was something that told him that it wasn’t Shelley that was coming down the stairs at that very moment.

He held his breath, holding Roman tightly against him. In fact, the only thing that he could feel at that moment, was the fact that Roman was shaking like a leaf.

He didn’t have to turn around to know who it was.

Olivia examined the police officers in turn, noting the blood and brain that had spilled out onto the throw rug. “I must say darling, you have an incredible amount of restraint.” 

Roman was holding onto him so tightly at that moment that he was pretty sure he was going to have holes in his shirt. Peter held his breath for a moment, as though that could make him disappear. Roman had been upir for less than forty-eight hours, but if he concentrated very hard, he could pick up the scent.

Upir too, but she had been upir far longer, Peter thought. He didn’t know for exactly how long. Destiny had always been better at all of the supernatural stuff, which seemed almost funny to him, even as he felt distinctly like he’d just been caught in a trap, and one that was infinitely more dangerous than a van that said ‘Fish and Wildlife’ on the side.

For the most part, Olivia acted like he wasn’t even there. It filled him with relief and terror at the same time. He was afraid to breathe too much, lest she actually start paying attention to him.

“Darling,” Olivia repeated, stepping closer until she was standing inches behind him. She knelt down, and Peter squeezed his eyes shut. 

He wasn’t sure if she’d tried to compel him, but then again, he didn’t really know what she would do.

She placed a hand on Roman’s back and caressed him for a moment. “Oh, my darling baby boy, what will I ever do with you?”

Roman shrunk away from her touch, and Peter’s arms were beginning to ache from holding him. 

She stood up again, looking down at the two of them. 

“You’re so close, Roman,” she murmured. “Now, there’s just one more thing that you have to do.” 

The remarkable thing about Olivia was that she didn’t have to say very much for Peter to know exactly what she meant. 

“No,” Roman croaked, glaring at his mother. “No, I won’t. That was different--that--”

His words died in his throat, and Olivia looked at him intently.

“You have to,” Olivia said gently, although there was nothing gentle about what she was implying. “You have to if you’re going to become exactly who you were always meant to be.” 

Peter didn’t dare move. He was pretty confident that if Roman didn’t kill him in that moment, Olivia would, and just to prove a point. 

What happened next was even more sudden than Roman convincing the police officers to off themselves. 

Roman let go of him, and lunged. This was like it had been with the woman who had kidnapped him, but worse. So much worse. 

Peter sat there on the floor, still staying completely still. Roman’s teeth dug into Olivia’s throat, dug into her mouth, kept fucking digging into her skin until Peter registered that he was the one shaking, because while he had never been that squeamish before, Olivia’s blood had spattered onto his hands and face.

And he was pretty certain that he’d heard the wet splat that was Olivia’s tongue making contact with the floor. 

Roman was leaning forward, saying something over her. He spat, and turned back to face Peter, blood on his lips, just as it had been when he’d killed the woman on the side of the road.

Peter stared down at Roman’s mother and then over at the officers, and said, “Shee-it.”

“Shee-it,” Roman echoed, lighting a cigarette, and not bothering to wipe the blood off of his face this time. 

“We have to--” the words died in his throat. His mom. Shelley. They had to leave them behind. But how the hell were they going to get very fall? And the fucking vargulf - it still wasn’t dead, not by a long shot. 

And Letha.

Fuck, he needed to call Letha, didn’t he? If it was only to tell her that she needed to go somewhere safe and stay there. Not worry about him. Holy hell. What was he going to tell her? She would probably want answers, because she was smart and she wouldn’t just accept him sending a simple ‘goodbye’ text, and she would think something was off if he decided to just completely ghost her too. 

And what if she sent some people to track them down? Would that help? Or would that be a one-way ticket to prison? 

Shit, there were enough dead bodies in the fucking living room to get them both more than a one-way ticket to prison.

The Godfrey Manor at that moment felt unnaturally small, as though it was contracting and would squeeze him to death at any moment. He tried to steady his breathing. Roman was looking at him now - watching him, in a way that was making him feel like he had pins underneath his skin.

“Stop looking at me like that,” Peter protested. “We have to--” He wasn’t sure if he could finish that sentence without vomiting from stress. 

“We have to go,” Roman finished for him. “Together.” Although he wanted to protest and say that they should go their separate ways, try to lie low without drawing too much attention to themselves, he had a feeling that - Roman, at least - was not going to last very long on his own. 

It was in that moment that Peter was pretty confident that he should have listened to his mother when she’d told him to stay away from the Godfreys. 

“Yes,” Peter murmured quietly, scrambling to his feet, although it was his turn to grip the table for support. “We have to go right now.” 


	6. Kentucky

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Going on the Run 101

“....do you want to talk about what your mom…” Peter started, before Roman glared at him. 

“I never want to talk about that miserable cunt again in my entire life.”

“Okay,” Peter said gently, watching Hemlock Grove disappear in the rearview mirror. He checked his phone and noticed several missed messages from Letha. 

He let out a shaky breath and tried to distract himself by debating whether it would be a good idea to send a text to his mother - let her know he was okay, for now. While he knew that Roman’s mom had called her and let her know that he was staying over, a lot, to say the least, had happened since then.

He wondered if it would be better or worse for his phone to die before she was able to give him a call.

~

They had been riding in silence for the past two hours, Peter slumped down in his seat as he fiddled with Roman’s phone. Roman had given him instructions to navigate them out of Hemlock Grove, but once they’d been driving for an hour, it felt a little pointless to pretend that they were going anywhere in particular.

“I’m sorry,” Roman said. 

Peter scrolled through the apps on Roman’s phone, noting with amusement that he’d at one point or another downloaded Duolingo. “Did you download this because Destiny called you a ‘gadjo’ that time?” he asked, grinning to himself. It seemed just like Roman to hear a word in another language, feel insulted, and then decide that the only sensible solution was to learn the entire language himself as revenge.

“Are you even listening?” Roman snapped, holding the steering wheel so tightly that his knuckles were turning impossibly white. 

“I am.”

“Then shouldn’t you be saying something else? Like ‘gee Roman, I’m sorry about all this too.”

Peter gave him a quizzical look. “When have I said ‘gee’ in the entire time that you’ve known me?”

Roman clenched his jaw so tightly that for a split second, Peter had to wonder if he was going to slam the brakes and lose precious seconds when they were on the run. 

Though maybe on the run was a bit of a stretch, because as far as Peter could tell, nobody had been behind them for at least the past ten miles. 

Roman didn’t stop the car, but he did mash the horn for a solid ten seconds that made Peter cover his ears.

“So much for being on the run, I guess,” Peter grumbled under his breath. 

Roman didn’t regret changing to save Peter, he really didn’t. He could find some way to live with hearing the low thrum of people’s heartbeats, or seeing the blood flow through the veins underneath their skin. He could.

But ruining Peter’s life because he was the equivalent of a human-sized leech? Now that didn’t really seem like something he could live with. 

“This is why I didn’t want you to help me kill the vargulf,” Peter said finally. “Because I didn’t want you to get involved.” 

Roman laughed, although it sounded sharp and mean. He was still gripping the steering wheel too tightly. 

“Right, like I had a choice in getting involved.”

Peter raised an eyebrow. “What does that mean?” 

Roman went silent for a moment, before he said, “Have you talked to Letha since we left?”

Peter furrowed his brow at him. “Don’t change the subject.” 

He didn’t want to talk about Letha anyway. His own phone had died already, with its piece of shit battery, because he hadn’t been able to stop himself from compulsively reviewing her texts. 

Where are you, Peter? Please Peter, talk to me. One missed call. Are you okay? Two missed calls. Please call me back. 

He hadn’t been able to bring himself to respond. He couldn’t ignore the feeling in his balls that the longer that he was around her, the more he was putting her in danger. 

“What?” Roman shot back. “I’m not allowed to ask you about my cousin? The cousin who I told you not to go out with, by the way.”

Peter raised an eyebrow at him. He remembered words that were a bit sharper than ‘don’t go out with her’. 

“Stop,” Peter said through gritted teeth, because the thing about Roman was that you could almost always tell what he was going to say by watching his eyes. And, by watching his eyes, Peter could tell that he was teetering on the edge of saying something that would make him want to punch him while he was driving.

He watched him carefully, noting the way that Roman’s shoulders relaxed and he stopped gripping the steering wheel so tightly. “All I meant,” Roman said, thrumming his fingers against the leather, “Was that I was never...normal. You could go off and kill the vargulf all by yourself, but it wouldn’t change the fact that I’m like you.”

The way that he said ‘I’m like you’ was lighter - and if Peter had to think about it, almost affectionate. And maybe it was true, because after all, they were both gadjo, weren’t they? 

Peter scrubbed a hand over his face, because the more he thought about it, the more it didn’t seem true that they were the same. He got to walk around with a human face. Roman did not, as much as he tried to rationalize that Roman was different from other upir. 

He looked over at him for a moment, and contemplated telling him this. That just because he was upir did not mean that he was anything like him. 

But the more he thought about it, the more that seemed like a betrayal, so he quickly dismissed it.

Instead, he focused on the other thing that was true.

“You could have lived your entire life being normal,” Peter said, “Without--”

“--knowing,” Roman finished for him. Peter nodded.

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you,” he said, watching Roman chew on his bottom lip. “But since you didn’t know, it seemed like the best thing to do was not to tell you.” 

He watched Roman carefully for a reaction - the last time that they’d had this conversation, there’d been something floating underneath the surface that Peter couldn’t quite name. It was as though Roman was simultaneously disgusted with himself and angry that Peter had known what he was.

“Stop looking at me,” Roman snapped suddenly, waving a hand at him. 

Peter rolled his eyes. “Why I didn’t tell you isn’t important anymore,” he amended, “but I’m still sorry.”

“Kind of a shitty apology, Fido.” 

Peter quirked an eyebrow at him, and Roman was only able to keep a straight face for about ten seconds before he burst out laughing. Peter smiled and laughed too. 

~

They’d been on the road for about ten hours at this point, stopping only once around hour five to stretch their legs and order food from a roadside diner. 

“Shee-it, I would have gone on the run a long time ago if it meant that you would be paying for everything,” Peter grinned when they got back in the car.

“That’s not funny,” Roman grumbled under his breath as he carefully unwrapped the food in his lap. 

~

Whenever it was close to a full moon, Peter always found himself craving red meat, as rare and underdone as possible. But as it moved away from the moon and the cycle restarted, reminding himself that he had eaten raw meat before made him feel sick to his stomach. 

He definitely wouldn’t admit to Roman (really, anyone, but at the moment, the world seemed to have contracted to Roman), but that nausea was always something of a relief. 

He realized, as he sunk his teeth into the burger that Roman had bought for him, that he hadn’t seen Roman eat since he’d been rescued from the Fish and Wildlife van.

Indeed, the food that Roman had bought for himself and even gone as far as unwrapping, was still lying there uneaten.

Peter furrowed his brow.

“You should eat.”

“I’m fine,” Roman grunted, gripping the steering wheel tightly again.

“You won’t be if you don’t eat.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Jesus Christ, it just means that you should eat if you’re driving. Not everything has to have some secret, hidden meaning.”

“You’re a fucking werewolf and I’m a vampire.”

“Upir.”

“Same fucking difference,” Roman snapped. “Point is, there are a lot of secret, hidden meanings.”

Peter rolled his eyes. “Fine,” he huffed. “I don’t want you to snap and decide to eat someone because you were being too much of a fucking drama queen to eat diner food. That good for a hidden meaning?”

Roman narrowed his eyes at him and took a bite out of the burger in his lap, though Peter fully expected him to spit it out out of spite. 

~

“Roman,” Peter said gently. “I don’t think you’ve blinked for ten minutes.” 

Roman glanced over at him. “So? Isn’t that one of those vampire things?”

Peter raised an eyebrow. “Not blinking for long periods of time? I mean it might be, but we’ve also been driving a really long time.” 

“I’m fine, I don’t want to stop.”

Peter shook his head. “We passed into Kentucky a while ago - we should try to find a motel or something.” 

Roman shook his head. “Too dangerous.”

“Right, because it’s news to me that we’re on the run,” Peter deadpanned. There had been no consistent cars behind them, but that didn’t mean that someone couldn’t recognize them. Or, if Roman used a credit or debit card, that it couldn’t be traced if there was someone looking for them. 

“We can sleep in the car,” Roman offered. “In the woods or something.”

Peter snorted. “Someone could still find us. If I’m going to get arrested I might as well get arrested indoors.” 

Roman looked just as worried as he felt by the idea, but shrugged and nodded. “Fine. But when we find a motel, you are cutting that hair.”

Peter snorted. He didn’t exactly like the idea of cutting his hair, but the more he turned over the idea in his head, the more he was willing to accept it. It wasn’t the best disguise in the world, but it wasn’t the worst either. He’d just have to come up with a way to get back at him later (suggesting he dye his hair purple was the current idea at the top of his mind).

“Fine, but I know that no one will miss my hair more when it’s gone than you, Godfrey,” Peter grinned.

In that moment, Roman actually smiled.

~

They found a motel outside of Lexington, after having a discussion about whether it would be better to be close to a major city or far away from it. Seeing as they had come up with no good answers and really just come close to yelling at each other, they compromised by stopping at the first motel they saw after the argument was over.

There were a handful of cars out front, and the inside of the motel reminded him of the shady-looking motels by the interstate outside of Hemlock Grove. 

Peter wrinkled his nose as old cigarette smoke flooded his nostrils. While Roman paid for the room - in cash, because Jesus Christ, trying not to be found was just making them look suspicious, wasn’t it? He decided to take a look around.

There wasn’t a bulletin board somewhere with pictures of them - did those only exist in the movies or did motels just not have them? He did, however, note when he went back outside to get his backpack, that Roman’s car could be easily seen from the street. 

It suddenly occurred to him that he might have to steal a car. But then would that make it easier or harder for them to be found? And were they even being chased? Had they made themselves look worse by running? 

“Fuck,” Peter murmured, rubbing his temples. His thoughts had been jumbled up in his mind since the murder-suicide that Roman had made happen in his fucking living room. 

Roman.

Fucking hell, he thought to himself, hadn’t Destiny and his mother taught him better than this? Had he just seriously left an upir inside a highway motel completely unsupervised?

Swearing again under his breath, he grabbed Roman’s bag and turned to head back inside the motel, when he nearly smacked straight into Roman.

“I’m sorry--” he started, evidently looking more worried than he thought he did by Roman’s reaction. “We--”

“--I can control myself better than that,” Roman snapped, and Peter nodded curtly. It had barely been 72 hours since the change, if Peter had his math right, but he didn’t want to ruin Roman’s resolve to stay in control by admitting that he fully expected him to lose it at any moment.

When they get back inside, they head to their room. In proper lighting, he can tell that Roman’s on edge, and when he opens the door, he nearly collapses on the bed.

“Roman!” 

“I’m fine,” he said, although the disjointed way that he was slumped against the mattress did not inspire confidence. “Finefinefinefine.”

“Fuck,” Peter grumbled as he took in the glassy look in Roman’s eyes. His head kept lolling off to one side. “Roman can you look at me?”

“I’m looking right at you,” Roman grunted. “Tell your blood vessels to stop looking at me.” 

Feeding. Fuck. 

“You stupid asshole,” Peter grumbled under his breath. There was clearly only one solution, he thought.

Roman watched him closely. Peter rolled up his arm and shoved it in front of Roman’s face. “Drink.”

“I thought you didn’t want me to bite you,” Roman murmured, though whatever resistance he’s trying to put up is clearly failing, because he’s gripping Peter’s harm hard now.

“Not wanting you to rip my throat out and not wanting you to die are two separate things,” Peter shook his head, and there’s a flash of recognition in Roman’s eyes at the word ‘die.’ 

Whatever argument that Roman was planning to put up is gone, because a couple of seconds later, Roman’s fangs flare, and he sinks his teeth into Peter’s arm.   
And it’s….

Not unpleasant, if Peter’s being honest.

It should be, he thought. He should feel like he’s going to die. Some wolf fight-or-flight instinct should have kicked in. But it doesn’t.

He watched Roman carefully, digging his fingernails into his palms so that he doesn’t scream at the intrusion of sharp teeth under his skin. Roman’s tongue--lapping at the blood--sends a shiver up his spine that’s honestly not unpleasant. It’s almost nice.

Thankfully, the moment that thought pops into his brain, Roman’s tongue prods at a nerve and he forgets it entirely. 

He wasn’t sure how much time passed before Roman stopped, lips covered with his blood.

He’s aware of the fact that he’s stared at him longer than he meant to.

“I don’t want to feed on you,” he said finally. “You don’t deserve it.”

Peter looked down at the puncture wounds in his arm and the trickle of blood. “It’s fine,” he repeated. “Like I said, I don’t want you to starve. Next time fucking eat something when I tell you to.”

“You didn’t say starve, you said die.”

“Fine. I said die.”

Roman quirked an eyebrow at him. “I didn’t think I could die.”

Peter let out a shaky breath, and leaned back against the mattress. “Few months ago you didn’t know about werewolves or any of that shit and now you’re surprised that you can die. Things do change, don’t they?”

“Shee-it,” Roman said, grinning, and Peter smiles too. 

“We should get some rest,” Peter volunteered finally. Roman nodded, but when Peter reached out to help him up, he waved him off. 

“I’m not some fucking invalid,” Roman snapped, before crawling into bed. 

Peter bit his lip and nodded, before deciding he needed a shower, to charge his phone, and to come up with a plan. For the vargulf, for the rest of their lives, he wasn’t sure yet. 

As he walked over to the shower, he shot a look in Roman’s direction. He looked like he was sound asleep. He wasn’t familiar with upir sleeping habits - and he definitely wasn’t sure what would happen if Roman woke up hungry. What if he---

Peter shook his head, and decided he needed to take the risk for one night. Then he could figure out what to do next.


	7. Caraway Heart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Johann, we have known each other for a very long time. I find lying very irritating."

“Your reflexes are coming along,” Dr. Pryce said as he tapped Olivia’s knees. He examined her reflexes for a moment before moving to her mouth. “Open up.”

Olivia gave him a dirty look, and he shrugged. “Have to check how it’s healing,” he explained, and as she opened her mouth, he examined the sutures that were holding her tongue together. “Good...seems to be healing on track.”

“Don’t lie to me,” Olivia said, once he’d taken a step back. She could tell that something about her body was different after Roman had bitten her. The sutures in her mouth should have dissolved within days, and now, here they were two weeks later, and she could still feel them, sharp, prodding, and alien against her lip.

“I don’t want to worry you if I don’t have a good reason to.”

“Johann, we have known each other for a very long time. I find lying very irritating,” she gave him a sharp look.

Johann sighed as he sat down in a chair across from Olivia. “The truth is, Olivia, is that you’re not healing like you used to.”

“I don’t pay you as much as I do to hear things I already know,” Olivia said, trying to resist the urge to rub the sutures with her lip. 

Johann gave her an amused smile. “No. I don’t know a lot about what might be causing your condition, but, if I had to guess...and this is really just a guess, is that if an upir bites another upir that it might almost have a...poisonous quality to it.”

Olivia raised an eyebrow. “Poisonous quality?”

“Think of it this way - if an upir bites a human, they might be dazed or in shock, but if an upir bites another upir...well, like I said, it’s just a guess, but...there’s every chance that it might do a lot more than making you feel sick.”

Olivia could feel her temper flare, if only because Johann seemed to be implying that she was weaker than a human, who might be able to shake off an upir bite if they weren’t completely drained of blood. Johann watched her carefully, and seemingly sensing that she was about seconds away from biting his head off (possibly even literally, it was always hard to tell with her), shook his head.

“It’s not a weakness,” he clarified. “Not really...it’s just that we’re in uncharted territory. We don’t know what kind of long-term effects there might be when an upir bites another upir.” 

Olivia pursed her lips. “What do you need?”

“An assistant,” Johann nodded. “Preferably one that has some familiarity with upirs and can be relied on to keep their mouth shut.” 

Olivia wrinkled her nose. “How much is it going to cost me?”

Johann smirked playfully. “Will cost a lot more if I have to try to figure everything out on my own.” 

~ 

Dr. Galina Zhelezhnova-Burdukovskaya’s hiring put a sizable dent in the Godfrey Institute’s Research and Development budget for that quarter, but Johann knew the drill by now. Shift the money around, re-write the budget, and the board wouldn’t know where any of the money went. 

Olivia doesn’t need to know her name, nor does she need to know the full extent of what they’re working on. Not yet. She knew what was only necessary, nothing more.

Of course, hoping that Olivia would never find out is an exercise in foolishness. 

~

Olivia was sitting in the greenhouse, her cane balanced carefully against her chair when Johann came in. “I know how much it cost,” she said simply, looking off into the distance before flicking her gaze over to him. 

He had frankly always enjoyed this about Olivia - that she always almost looked bored with you no matter the content of conversation, as though she was a queen and everyone else existed only for her own amusement. 

“Of course,” he nodded. “I expected you to find out sooner or later.” Of course, there was a gulf between looking at the amount of money that had disappeared and finding out what he’d actually done with it. 

“This...vargulf, you said Roman called it. I have reason to believe that it’s still in Hemlock Grove,” Johann began.

“What does that have to do with anything?” 

“Some research that me and my - ah - associate have been conducting recently looks fairly promising. Since your exposure to upir saliva, you haven’t been healing at your - ah - usual, rate. You’ve been healing like the rest of us.”

“Are you saying I’m aging?”

“In a way, yes.” He and Galina had been studying her lab work for the past week, and Galina, as whip smart and experienced with upirs as she was, had pointed it out to him - accelerated cell deterioration. 

“It’s almost as if you’ve been the same age for too long, and your body is trying to catch up.”

Olivia furrowed her brow. “Can you fix it?” 

Johann tutted to himself. While he’d been able to bring Olivia back from the dead, and there truthfully wasn’t very much that he couldn’t fix, this was a complicated problem. 

“My associate has reason to suspect that werewolf blood would stabilize the deterioration process. Otherwise…”

He trailed off, looking away. Olivia fixed him with a steely glare.

“You have reason to believe what, Johann?”

“You may have a year left. Maybe two. It’s difficult to say at this juncture.” 

Olivia made a face. “What are you suggesting?” 

~

For the past two weeks, he and Roman had been flitting between motels in Kentucky and Tennessee, doing their best to make sure that they flew under the radar. But as Peter stood by the vending machine in the hall outside their room, he couldn’t help but get an uneasy, worrying feeling in his balls.

Nicolae had always told him not to ignore those feelings, but he never told him what he was supposed to do when there were a thousand different things that he could have been picking up on. 

Like the fact that Roman seemed to be collapsing in on himself the more time passed.

Roman was the reason that he was out here in the first place, because even though he’d been doing okay subsisting on rare meat for the past two weeks, he’d refused to eat dinner for the second time in three days, and Peter was losing his patience. The last thing that he needed at the moment was to need to give up sleeping to make sure that Roman didn’t get so hungry that he ended up killing someone.

He swore loudly as the vending machine sputtered and the bag of chips got stuck. He smacked it with more strength than he meant to, and pressed his head against it. 

Maybe he was feeling sleep-deprived, or maybe he was missing his hair, like Roman accused him of practically every day since he’d cut it off to be less recognizable. But suddenly he felt like he was on the verge of bursting into tears over chips that wouldn’t fall. 

Several punches, three more quarters, and two poptarts and a bag of chips later, and he suddenly felt like everything was looking up. Fucking hell, he needed to get more sleep. 

He’d left Roman sleeping, but when he came back into the room, Roman was wide awake and staring at him unblinkingly. “Jesus Christ, Godfrey,” he murmured. “Don’t fucking stare at me like that.”

“I’m hungry,” Roman murmured pathetically, and Peter threw the snacks into his lap.

“You need to eat when I tell you to.”

Roman wrinkled his nose and picked at the plastic packaging. “But I don’t want it.”

This, Peter had been afraid of.

He didn’t know much about upirs, but he did know that regular food - he almost thought ‘human food’, but that felt unfair when he wasn’t entirely human himself - didn’t hold as much appeal for them as blood did.

“Food tastes weird,” Roman added, inspecting a piece of strawberry poptart between his fingers. “It doesn’t taste right.” 

Peter let out a heavy sigh and ran a hand through his hair - forgetting for a moment that it was barely there now. “Fuck,” he murmured under his breath as he started pacing back and forth. “You need blood.” 

Roman wrinkled his nose again. “No.”

Peter stopped pacing for a moment and raised an eyebrow at him. “What do you mean no?” 

“No, I don’t want to be a leech. I don’t want to hurt people. I already hurt people.”

Peter hesitated for a moment, before nodding. Arguments died in his throat, because it was true. There were three - possibly even four - people who were dead because of Roman. And yet, it was hard to stop himself from feeling an impulse to reassure him.

“You did what you thought you had to do. To protect me. Protect us,” he said, his tone coming out strangled when he said the word ‘us’. 

Because frankly, it was overwhelming every time he tried to think about what Roman had done to rescue him. 

He sat down on the bed next to him, and Roman wasted no time in curling up against him. “You’re warm,” he murmured into him. “It’s nice.”

Peter ignored the pleasant tingle that went up his spine at the contact, and picked up the poptart again. “I will let you drink again if you try eating normal food once in a while.”

Roman’s nose wrinkled again at the word ‘normal’, and although Peter wasn’t thrilled at himself for the word choice, he nodded. “Fine mom, I’ll have dinner first.” 

He paused for a moment after popping a piece of poptart into his mouth, wincing as he chewed and swallowed. “Would you really be okay if I did?” The words went unsaid, but Peter didn’t have to guess at what he meant.

“Yeah Roman, it’s fine. You already did it once, so...we can figure out some kind of system or something. I’m not letting you starve.” 

~

“Are you sure this is the only way? What about this vargulf?” Olivia asked, balancing herself carefully with her cane as she considered Johann’s proposition. 

“Vargulf might work,” he admitted. “They’re the same, physiologically speaking. However, I would be remiss as your doctor if I didn’t examine alternate possibilities.”

“Which are?”

“It is completely possible, Olivia, that the vargulf’s blood will not help. It could be too far gone. Sick. Not much use to you.” 

Olivia nodded as she considered his plan. “Do what needs to be done. Lord knows I’ve done my share,” she murmured, shaking her head. “Just don’t hurt Roman.”

Johann chuckled to himself. “What happened to that heart the size of a caraway seed?”

A hint of amusement flashed across her face. “You could say I’m getting older.” 

~ 

It’s another few days before it dawned on Peter in the middle of the night that no one is looking for them.

Even still, he couldn’t be entirely sure. He has only been able to sleep in tortuous thirty-minute intervals, which very possibly might be messing with his head. But he does know that when they get in Roman’s car and drive, they aren’t followed. He hasn’t seen them on the news. And he definitely hasn’t seen descriptions of them posted anywhere.

It feels wrong. Someone has to be looking for them, after everything that happened. The cops that showed up at the Godfrey’s were looking for Clementine Chasseur - and someone out there had to be looking for the cops themselves. 

And Olivia, fuck if that didn’t make Roman at least look guilty as hell.

For the past few nights, Roman had been having as much trouble sleeping as him, and after a few half-hearted protests, Peter had let him climb into bed with him. For the most part, it was okay, aside from the fact that Roman was ice cold, and even with extra blankets from Roman’s bed piled on top of his (or really, theirs), it was still like trying to go to sleep inside a freezer.

Carefully, as to not disturb Roman, he gingerly plucked his phone off the nightstand, scrolling to see the new text messages. There were a handful from Destiny: (‘What the hell, Peter?! A detective just showed up at my apartment asking if I knew where you were!’). Some from his mother, (‘Please baby, just come home.’)

But it was the one from Letha that made him pause. 

‘Please Peter, something’s happening, I can tell.’

‘Peter, something’s wrong.’

‘Peter, you need to come home, I don’t feel okay.’

The last message made him sit up.

~

“They’re somewhere outside of Nashville,” Johann laid the file in front of Olivia. “They haven’t gone very far for two boys that think they’re on the run from the police.”

All Olivia could do was shake her head. “He doesn’t even understand how much I’ve protected him. Or you’ve protected him.” The investigation into Clementine Chasseur’s disappearance, as well as the murder-suicide at the Godfrey residence had all but disappeared after she’d paid a trip to the police station.

“And yet he doesn’t even run that far,” Johann said, clicking his tongue.

~

More texts came from Letha, but Peter was too scared to respond to any of them, afraid that it would give up their location. Judging by the texts from Destiny and his mother, the cops hadn’t contacted them again. It made him hopeful that maybe they’d be able to go home. 

But Letha’s texts set his teeth on edge. Each one of them mentioned some unspecified danger. In one text, Letha said that she thought she was being watched. In another, she said that someone had broken into their house when she was over at a friend’s. Nothing, of course, was taken.

When he broached the subject of the texts, Roman shook his head. “That could be anything - she’s gone to the cops, right?”

It wasn’t like Roman to be so blase when it came to Letha. Peter raised an eyebrow at him. “Do you really trust the cops after what happened to us? Besides, something tells me that it’s not a burglar.”

Roman snorted. “Can feel it in your balls, right?”

It was hard for Peter not to grin at him, despite his suspicions. After the moment of levity had passed, he chewed his bottom lip. “I think it’s the vargulf in human form, looking for its next target.”

Roman’s blase attitude disappeared almost immediately. “We have to go back, we can’t--she’ll be in danger.” 

“I don’t know if we can go back, not after what happened,” Peter admitted. “And you definitely can’t.”

“Yeah?” Roman raised an eyebrow, tilting his jaw up as he stared Peter down. “Just try and stop me, Rumancek.” 

~

In the motel’s lobby - if it could be called that - a man walked up to the reception desk. “I’d like a room for two nights,” he said to the receptionist, a young girl in her early 20s. 

The girl nodded, and started typing on a computer, furrowing her brow every few seconds. “I need to go check on it, but 208 should be ready for you. Wait here, please.”

The man smiled and nodded. Once the girl was out of sight, he ducked behind the counter, scrolling through the list of names in the motel’s directory. 

He was amused when he noticed that 107’s occupants were using their real names.


	8. Warmth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Roman crept closer to him, and stretched across the bed, pulling him into his side. “I’m sorry, Peter,” he murmured gently against him. “I’m sorry that I did this to you.”

Peter’s eyes widened. He shook Roman’s arm. “We have to go.”

Roman raised an eyebrow at him. “What are you talking about?”

“No time. We have to go, right now.” Peter had sprung off the bed and was tossing their clothes back into their backpacks, before he stopped. “Seriously, no time. We should probably leave through the window.” 

Peter had wrenched the window open and was halfway outside when he heard Roman ask, “Are you going to bother telling me what’s going on?”

He cast a look over his shoulder. “Nope.” 

Then, there was a knock at the door.

Both Peter and Roman didn’t move. Didn’t breathe.

But the knocking just became louder and more intense, and frankly, Peter was starting to get worried about the structural integrity of motel room doors. “Come on!” he mouthed at Roman. 

Peter scrambled out of the window - with Roman not far behind. He cast a glance over his shoulder - spotting the man who had burst into their room for only a second before he forced himself to focus. He could still hear the sound of the door reverberating in his ears as they sprinted across the parking lot and got into the car. 

The man was not far behind. 

Roman initially got into the driver’s seat, but Peter shoved him over. “You are seriously in no condition to drive.” 

Rather than dispute this (as he would have on any other day, because his cars, particularly the jaguar, were a point of pride), Roman got in the front passenger’s seat, and Peter hit the gas, getting back on the highway as quickly as he could. 

He could hear and feel his heart hammering in his chest. He was gripping the steering wheel tightly as he changed lanes once, and then twice. “Is he behind us?” He could have sworn that he’d seen him get into a car, but he’d been so focused on making sure that Roman didn’t drive that he hadn’t been paying enough attention. 

Roman looked behind them and craned his neck. “I think so? Maybe?”

Frustration bubbled inside of him. Peter slammed his hand down on the dashboard. “You have to fucking do better than that, Roman.” 

Roman winced. “Yeah, I think he’s behind us still.”

“Okay,” Peter said, although he was having a difficult time keeping a level head at the moment. His vision seemed to be narrowing to a pinprick - and yet, it had to be better than letting Roman drive - he frankly didn’t trust him when he was hungry.

Peter brought the speed up, and changed lanes again. “I’m going to take the next exit and see if we can lose him.” Roman nodded.

He changed lanes a fourth time, before cutting across several lanes and darting down the exit ramp. His heart was still hammering in his chest, and in the back of his head, he could picture his mom being horrified at his driving.

Roman turned around and nodded. “He’s gone.”

“Fuck,” Peter let out a breath that he hadn’t realized he’d been holding in. And then he let out another breath, because frankly, the impact of the last few minutes was making him feel like he was about to have a heart attack. Or throw up. Or both.

“I’m going to drive for another few hours,” Peter said, once he felt as though he’d regained some sense of equilibrium. “Then maybe we can figure out what to do next.” 

~

A few hours turned into six, and then seven. It was getting dark when Peter decided that they had gone far enough to not be found. He pulled off the main road and stopped at another motel. He’d seen a sign for North Carolina a while back, and now, he was just praying that they’d gone far enough. 

~

For the first time in the past couple of weeks, Roman ate everything that he put in front of him. It was a small victory, but it was a victory. Roman was completely useless - not to mention a liability - when he was hungry.

Peter leaned back on the bed as Roman finished his food, and then picked idly at his own fries. “We have to go back, Peter,” he said through a mouthful of food. “We can’t be all the way out here when Letha is in trouble.”

Peter squeezed his eyes shut. “We don’t know anything for sure.” That was more for his own benefit than for Roman’s (or hell, even for Letha’s), because frankly, having to take care of a fledgling upir was wearing his patience pretty thin. 

“You love her.”

“I’m tired, Roman.”

“Why do you avoid talking about Letha?”

“I’m not avoiding it. Why do you want to talk about Letha?”

“She’s my cousin.” 

Peter opened one eye to look over at Roman. “I know.”

“You’re just….being weird.” 

Peter let out a shaky breath. “Maybe I’m tired because we were on the fucking run from the cops, and then clearly some crazy guy is after us. We still don’t know who he is, by the way. Or what the hell he wants.” 

He shut his eyes again and shifted on the bed. When he opened his eyes again, Roman was standing in front of him. “Jesus Christ!”

Roman crept closer to him, and stretched across the bed, pulling him into his side. “I’m sorry, Peter,” he murmured gently against him. “I’m sorry that I did this to you.” 

Peter almost laughed, because even now, Roman seemed to not understand the severity of what he’d done to himself. 

But he kept murmuring those little apologies, keeping Peter wrapped up in his arms. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.” 

And Peter had to admit to himself that it was nice to be wrapped up like this, and it was nice to hear the steady rhythm of Roman’s voice. Exhaustion and adrenaline and stress were a poisonous cocktail, and Roman, in that very moment, was the only thing keeping him level. 

It barely registered when Roman pressed a kiss to his temple, but when he turned him in his arms and pressed a kiss against his lips, it definitely registered.

“Roman, what are you doing?” he asked breathily, though he was still clinging to him hard, fingers digging into his shoulders.

Roman rested his forehead against his. “I don’t know,” Roman admitted. “I guess I just want one moment that belongs to us instead of the vargulf or crazy kidnappers or highway car chases.” 

And Peter - well, Peter’s entire body is still buzzing from adrenaline and stress and exhaustion, and he knows there probably won’t be any more sleep tonight. The last thing that he wanted to do was make Roman self-conscious about what he was (when he was already plenty, plenty self-conscious and got this look in his eye like he truly believed he was sub-human). He couldn’t handle Roman’s insecurities on top of making sure that he didn’t accidentally kill someone.  
But this was a welcome distraction.

When Roman kissed him again, he pressed more firmly into the kiss, until they were both kissing open-mouthed, tongues sliding against each other. 

Roman kissed a lot like Letha did, he thought idly, before shoving the thought out of his mind. Letha was the last thing that he wanted to think about at that moment. 

But it was hard to stop himself from making the comparison, especially when he was suddenly filled with the desire to have Roman give him a hickey (which was something Letha had been fond of doing) - a bad fucking idea, considering the fact that with his fangs, he would likely feed, even if he didn’t mean to. But fuck if he didn’t want it. 

Roman pressed him down gently into the mattress, peppering kisses against his neck that made him grind his hips against him. “Fuck,” he groaned, eyes slipping shut. 

The kisses would have been enough, but vaguely, far away, almost, he heard Roman murmur under his breath that he was going to take care of him. 

Roman pulled at his belt and inched his pants and boxers down his thighs enough to pull his cock out. 

He swore loudly - he opened his eyes for just a moment to look down at Roman, before swearing loudly and squeezing his eyes shut. 

It didn’t last long - not as long as Peter would have liked, frankly. 

Roman came off of him with a pop, and it took him a few seconds before it occurred to him that Roman had eased his own pants down his hips. 

He came first as Roman grinded against him, tongue in his mouth, with Roman a few seconds behind. 

They laid there for a moment longer, limbs tangled together. Peter wanted to make that warmth last longer, but of course, it wouldn’t. 

Because the vargulf was still out there.

Because Letha might be in danger.

Because there was someone out there, and they didn’t know who yet, who was looking for them. Why? They didn’t know that, either.

They could have filled books with what they didn’t know, Peter thought idly to himself. 

Roman pressed another kiss to Peter’s temple. “I did it for you. Did everything for you.” Peter nodded, curling up against him.

“I know you did,” he said softly, idly tracing shapes on Roman’s chest. The silence between them in that moment was more comforting than any they’d shared since they’d left Hemlock Grove. “We have to go back, I think. I don’t want to go back.” 

He didn’t want to run either, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something dangerous coming for them. Nicolae had taught him never to ignore those feelings, and he wasn’t about to start now. 

“The vargulf, Letha, and everything,” Peter murmured, clinging to Roman. “We have to go back...have to go back…”

His eyes were getting heavy. The last thing he remembered Roman saying before he fell asleep was, “Told you.” 

~ 

“I told you, Johann,” Olivia said as he set more pictures on her desk. “I expected you to handle this. I don’t want any part of it.” 

“Of course,” Johann smiled. “I just thought it would be prudent to update you on our progress.”

Olivia drew her mouth into a tight line, and then nodded. “How long?”

“Hopefully before the full moon,” Johann looked down at the photographs of Peter and Roman in Nashville, before glancing over to the one of them in North Carolina. “We want Rumancek to change here, if we can manage it.” 

~

Sunlight was streaming in through the curtains in their room. Peter winced, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. 

“Shee-it Roman, I thought you closed the curtains last night,” Peter murmured. 

But when he opened his eyes, his heart stopped.

The man that he’d only seen out of the corner of his eye before they’d left Tennessee was standing right there, at the foot of his bed, Roman shoved roughly to his knees beside him.

“Hello Peter,” he said. “We have a lot to talk about.”


	9. Lab Rat

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I’m coming back for you, whatever it takes.

Peter had expected that when he woke up in the morning he might get a moment or two to digest what had happened between him and Roman the night before. Examine what their friendship meant, examine whatever feelings he did or didn’t have. Only, he had no such luck. 

Because the man who had found them at the motel in Lexington had managed to catch up to them. 

“Who the hell are you?” he asked, furrowing his brow. “Why were you following us?” 

More importantly, he wanted to know why Roman wasn’t snapping this man in two right at that very moment. 

“Clementine Chasseur.”

“Who?”

The man looked somewhere between annoyed and angry that the name didn’t mean very much to him. He had heard it once, he thought, but it wasn’t enough to place where he’d heard it or who it belonged to.

“My sister,” he clarified. “She was with Fish and Wildlife. Before she died. Before you two killed her.”

There it was - the name that the cop had said shortly before Roman had forced his partner to kill him. The name of the woman who Roman had followed for hours into the night to find him, the name of the woman who had gasped wetly for breath as Roman made sure that the life poured out of her.

Only it wasn’t that poetic, Peter reminded himself. He’d bit her over and over again until her skin was practically nothing but puncture wounds, and her blood had turned into a fountain. 

“We didn’t have anything to do with your sister’s death,” Peter said evenly, eyes flicking over to Roman for a second. “You should leave, right now.” 

The man crushes Roman to the floor under the hell of his boot. Peter bit his lip when he heard Roman whine from the floor. 

“Oh, I’m leaving,” the man said, “but the two of you are coming with me.”

Anger surged inside Peter. The moon was coming, and so was his strength, but it wasn’t enough. Not to take on a man who was both larger and stronger than him, or one that had somehow managed to subdue Roman without him even waking up.

Shit, was he really that sleep-deprived? Fuck.

“If I go with you,” Peter started, “will you let him go? It’s me you really want, anyway?” He was only guessing, but it seemed likely, given that the man had bothered to restrain Roman and hadn’t just left with him. 

Roman was whimpering from his position on the floor. If Peter focused, he could hear him whispering “No, no, no,” into the carpet. 

But Roman had done enough for him, hadn’t he? If he could protect him, then he would do it. 

The man grinned at him. Far too wide and far too tooth. Peter almost thought he was upir too, but he wasn’t, was he? He was human.

Far too human.

“Are you going to take us to the police?” Peter asked. Destiny and his mom both seemed to think neither of them were going to be arrested if they came home, but how could that be true when Roman had dropped three bodies?

The man grinned again, in a way that made Peter feel like his blood was curdling in his veins. “No.”

The dart that came was so quick, so effortless, that Peter hadn’t even noticed that the man had them. He felt a slight pinch when it pierced his skin, swatting at it as though it was a mosquito bite, and then he felt nothing, not even dreams. 

-

When he awoke, he was in the back of a truck, wrists handcuffed behind his back. He didn’t see Roman, which almost gave him more anxiety than the gag that was currently pressing against his throat. 

He whimpered loudly, struggling against the handcuffs. Nicolae had once told him that he knew a way to get out of handcuffs, but he’d been so drunk when he’d explained it, Peter had to wonder if he’d tried it at all. 

-

Roman had no such luck with being tranquilized. Frankly, he had wished this man - Chasseur, or whatever - had tranquilized him too. Because then he wouldn’t have needed to see the look on Peter’s face when the dart sunk into his skin. 

He could...he should have…

Fuck, could this Chasseur read his thoughts? Because no sooner had he started thinking about an escape plan than something sharp was shoved into his back. 

“I will kill you if you so much as _think_ about using your abilities on me.”

“...What are you talking about?” Roman said thinly, and that sharp thing was pushed into his spine a second time. 

“You know what I’m talking about, _upir_.”

The word nearly hisses when it hits the air. Roman’s blood runs - if it still does, he isn’t sure - cold. 

“Okay,” he said dryly, licking his lips. “Okay. What do I have to do?” 

Frankly, he didn’t really care about dying, seeing as he’d already done it once, but fuck if he was leaving Peter alone.

“You’re going to check out,” Chasseur hissed. “Then, I’m going to take your friend to my car, and we’re all going to go back to Hemlock Grove together.”

Roman raised an eyebrow. “Why? Is there someone paying you? I can pay double. Or triple.”

Chasseur laughed. “You and I both know that you were running out of money on this little…. _adventure_. You’re not exactly in a position to be making requests like that.” 

“Fuck,” Roman murmured under his breath. “What about my car?” It wasn’t the jaguar (fuck, there’s no way he would let that be stranded in North Carolina), but it was still a nice car.

“Don’t do anything stupid, and you’ll get it back.” 

Chasseur looked at like him like he knew there was a chance he’d do something stupid, and to be fair, there kind of was.

-

Roman’s seated in the back of the van, eyes forward, hands in his lap as Chasseur had instructed when he began to hear the sound of Peter whimpering from behind him. “Is he okay?”

“He’s fine,” Chasseur grunted.  
“Can’t you just check?”

“Did I tell you that you were allowed to talk?” 

-

Everything’s foggy.

For a moment, Peter was almost confident that it was a full moon and he’d transformed, but...shifting didn’t feel like this. Not like something had come along, stuffed his head full of cotton and ripped apart his vision until it was frayed at the edges. 

The door to the back of the van opened at some point. It could have been hours or days, and he wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference. 

Hands were - are? - grabbing at him, yanking him to his feet and keeping him restrained. People are talking around him, and while he’s pretty sure they’re speaking English, he has no idea what they’re saying. 

And then he’s shoved somewhere bright and white - so blinding that he can barely see.

-

“This isn’t the way I wanted you to find out,” Olivia said evenly. Roman, for his part, had been restrained against a chair in her office, because he had kept making threats against Dr. Pryce and his staff. 

“Really, how did you want me to find out that you were planning on using Peter as some kind of science experiment,” Roman spat. “I wish he’d taken us to the police. That would have been better.” Now Peter was in a cage all over again, and this time, it was definitely his fault.

“It might be hard for you to believe, Roman,” Olivia continued, keeping a lengthy distance between the two of them. “But he’s not your friend. He’s not even human.”

“Neither are we,” he said petulantly. “You knew what was going to happen when you gave me that razor. Don’t pretend that you didn’t.”

“Whether I knew or not is irrelevant,” Oliva pursed her lips. “What is relevant, however, is the fact that he and the other wolf Pryce and his team have managed to capture are incredibly important to us.”

“I have a feeling you’re going to start telling me a fucking story, so don’t let me stop you,” Roman grunted.  
“When you...bit me, I started to age. I haven’t aged in centuries. I might be dead within a year.”

“Good.”

Olivia tutted to herself. “Oh my darling Roman,” she said sweetly, which always seemed to precede something that Roman definitely didn’t want to hear. “Peter Rumancek is meant for great things - as are you. It just so happens that is his great thing, so to speak, is to help you.”

Roman growled, straining against the restraints as Olivia continued to smile at him. “I hate you. I fucking hate you, you fucking cunt! What gives you the right to take the one good thing that ever happened in my fucking life away from me?”

Olivia was unphased by the torrent of curses and insults that spilled from his mouth. “There’s one other matter that I want to talk to you about.”

And then it occurred to him. Other wolf. Had they really succeeded in capturing the vargulf? Roman almost wanted to laugh, because he’d gone to the ends of the fucking Earth to find that stupid thing, when really what he should have done is just give Godfrey Industries a call. 

“You have the vargulf.”

Olivia nodded. Roman leaned back in the chair. “Fuck.”

“There’s something else,” and for the first time, Olivia almost looked worried. “Letha is dead.”

All of the air felt as though it was being sucked out of the room. “What the fuck? You can’t be serious.”

“Unfortunately, I am, because Letha was carrying your legacy.” 

Roman’s head snapped up. “What are you talking about?” 

Olivia gave him the same small, thin smile she always gave him when he was about to be told that he wasn’t allowed to know something. 

“It just means, my darling, that Peter might be important for us.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

Olivia waved a hand dismissively. “We can talk again when you’ve cooled off a bit more.” 

As she turned to leave, Roman swore under his breath. “Was that true? Is Letha really dead?”  
Olivia paused for a moment, and then did something close to a frown. “Yes, darling. I’m sorry.” 

Roman screamed. 

-

When Peter woke up, he was in another cage.

He jiggled the bars, but he didn’t have much luck. Especially since both of his arms were connected to the bottom of the cage with a chain. “Fuck,” he grumbled to himself. 

“Hello Peter.”

The sound of another person’s voice cut through the silence of the blinding white room. Peter jumped, held back by the chains. “Who the fuck are you?”

“Dr. Johann Pryce,” the man said calmly. “Do you know why you’re here?” 

Peter scoffed and rolled his eyes, because if there was one thing that the past few weeks had taught him, it was that he didn’t know much of anything at any time.

“No, I don’t know why I’m here, but I figure you’re about to tell me?” 

The corner of Dr. Pryce’s mouth twitches, resisting a smile. “You’re here for a very special project. We’re going to unlock the secrets of the upir genome together.” 

-

Roman wasn’t sure how long it took to convince the Russian lady that kept checking on him that he wasn’t going to hurt anyone if he was untied. Hours? Days? He was brought food at one point, but he’d refused it. It was probably petulant to refuse food when Peter was in trouble, but it felt like the only act of rebellion that was still available to him. 

Dr. Galina or whatever the fuck, was nice enough, he thought. Maybe didn’t know him very well, because when he asked to see their lab, expressed just a hint of interest in it, she told him that she’d be willing to take him there, as long as he was supervised the entire time.

It wasn’t quite what he wanted, but it was close enough. At the very least, it would give him the opportunity to wander through the underbelly of Godfrey Industries and figure out where Peter was being held. 

Fortunately, he didn’t have to wait long.

Man, Dr. Galina whatever the fuck was so fired, he thought to himself.

Because amidst the machines and lab equipment, and the cages of animals was Peter, looking miserable. 

“It’s a nice lab you have, Dr. Galina,” he said loudly, which made Peter look up. “Can you talk me through some of the work you’ve been doing?”

He glanced at Peter. He didn’t say anything out loud, but he hoped he understood.

_I’m coming back for you, whatever it takes._


	10. Plans

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Roman and Peter make plans.

Almost as soon as Roman had been old enough to talk, he’d made it his mission in life to undermine his mother. 

When he was younger and still working on grasping the intricacies of the world around him, he hadn’t totally understood why he hated her as much as he did, or why he was full of the impulse to defy her at every turn. 

Then, as he got a bit older, it had all come into view.

Perhaps he blamed her deep down for JR’s death, but it wasn’t really about that. It was about the way that she pushed Shelley around and decided what was in her best interest for her; it was the way that she issued judgments about his behavior; the way that she seemed to pull on the strings of everyone around her. 

It wasn’t the Godfrey name that controlled Hemlock Grove, it was Olivia, and he supposed that deep down, he had always known that on an intrinsic level.

They were exactly the same, him and her, and they had circled each other his entire life, like the predators that they both were. 

Everything that she’d done for him - to support him when he’d turned - it wasn’t for him, not really. It was for her. 

Roman knew that he would have easily rather died than let Peter live out some kind of half-existence for him. 

These were the things that occurred to him as Dr. Galina led him back to Olivia’s office. At a bare minimum, he wasn’t restrained again, but it was clear from the way that her brows knitted together when he made eye contact that she didn’t trust him. Probably expected him to compel her.

And to be honest, he had thought about it. 

It would have been easy to do it, he thought. Some people were harder than others, some actions were harder than others, he’d discovered in the short amount of time that he’d had the power. But he was confident that his will to rescue Peter was stronger than the will that she had to keep him imprisoned inside the White Tower. 

He could do it.

He just needed a plan.

Which to be honest, was easier said than done. As he paced around the office, he couldn’t help but think that anyone who was working with Dr. Pryce - like Dr. Galina, for example - knew about upirs and their powers. They’d be prepared for him to compel him, and would possibly - like the Chasseur woman had - even threaten him if he tried.

“Fuck,” he murmured to himself as he scrubbed his hands over his face. 

At the very least, he’d been allowed to see Peter. He knew, more or less, what he was working with. But that was a small comfort. 

And honestly, sometimes he thought that they were cursed, and not just because both of them were technically horror movie monsters. 

He chided himself even as he thought that - that definitely wasn’t how Peter thought of himself, and there was a small part of him that thought that he shouldn’t have thought about himself that way either. 

If he had his math right - and honestly, he wasn’t sure if he did, there’d been too many points on their road trip where he’d lost hours and had gaping holes in his memory from hunger - the full moon was in two days. Peter would have to shift whether he wanted to or not, and there was going to be nothing that he’d be able to do about it. 

He very much wanted to punch a hole in the wall, and the only thing that paused him was knowing that his mother would very much be able to tell that he had, probably would never let him out of her sight again, and Peter would be a fucking lab rat for the rest of his life.

Wait, there was an idea.

There were cameras in her office, weren’t there? 

Roman stopped pacing back and forth and ran a hand through his hair. If there was a way for him to convince his mother--or at least definitively convince someone like Dr. Galina or Dr. Pryce--that he should be let out, then he’d be able to help Peter.

It wasn’t just being let out, though, he needed unfettered access like he’d enjoyed before Peter had been kidnapped and his life had been turned upside down. 

He had to sit down and figure this out. 

_Don’t worry, Peter. Please._

-

From his position in the cage, Peter was very much worried. 

He’d tried - more than once over the past twelve hours - to slide his fingers through the bars on the cage and try to force the lock open. The closer to the change, the more strength he had, and it wouldn’t take much for him to be able to pry apart a padlock.

But of course, it wasn’t a padlock that was keeping him there. It was a biometric lock with a code of some kind, judging by the numbers on the keypad. He wasn’t going to be able to get out of there like this.

There was every possibility, he thought, that he would manage to get out when he shifted, although he didn’t much like that idea either. Although he had fangs and claws, he was infinitely more vulnerable, running on pure instinct.

He had two days now. He wasn’t sure if traveling around the country with Roman had been more or less stressful than this was. Maybe less, he thought, because at least before, he’d be able to protect Roman, even if he sometimes had to force him to drink and feed when he didn’t want to. 

It was always about Roman, that fucking asshole.

Peter’s chains rattled as he scrubbed a hand over his face. Nicolae would know what to do, he thought. Nicolae was a survivor, and he always had known what to do.

Although even as he remembered this, he could hear Destiny reminding him in the back of his head, _Nicolae drank himself to death and his brain rotted from the inside out and he became vargulf._

At least a vargulf would be able to escape. A vargulf wouldn’t be vulnerable. It would be a definite threat to the people that were keeping it captive. And for the first time in his life, he found himself wishing that he could make the bargain that would allow himself to become one.

It was at that moment that he remembered something that he’d heard when he had been pretending to be asleep. The vargulf had been caught, and was somewhere in the White Tower. Maybe close by, Peter guessed - the White Tower probably didn’t have an infinite number of spaces that could contain a werewolf, let alone a vargulf.

He pulled himself up into a standing position as best he could with limited use of his hands and went to the edge of the cage, craning his neck to see how much of his surroundings he could actually see. 

It was hard to know what time it was - it was always bright in the room where he was being held - but no one was around, so he reasoned that it must have been fairly late at night.

It took him about a minute to notice the girl that was crumpled up in a corner of another cage, her face shrouded by white hair. 

That couldn’t have been the vargulf, right? 

“Are you awake?” he asked softly. 

The girl stirred, and it was only when she shifted to face him that he sucked in a breath.

“Christina? What are you doing here?” He regretted the question almost as soon as he’d asked it, because frankly, he didn’t totally know what he was doing there either. Poor choice of words, really.

She rubbed the sleep away from her eyes. “I’m not Christina.”

Peter blinked. “Yes, you are.”

“No,” the girl said. “I’m not. She’s been dead for weeks. She was too scared to live like this, and it was too annoying to keep dealing with her being afraid. So I killed her.” 

“Vargulf,” Peter said plainly. “You can escape, can’t you?”

The girl hummed to herself. “I could, I suppose. But it’s not the right time.” 

Peter could only guess what that meant - vargulfs didn’t eat what they killed, and he could only imagine that it was gearing up to cause as much damage as possible.

“You’re going to put more people in danger.”

The girl tutted to herself. “Really? That’s what you’re going to say to me, little wolf?”

Peter clenched his jaw and steeled his gaze. “None of the people you’ve killed have deserved it.”

“And you think the people in here wouldn’t?” the girl laughed and rolled her eyes. “They will keep you in here until you die if that’s what they really want.” 

His thoughts immediately went to Roman, who he hadn’t seen since he’d walked through the lab a few hours - a day? - ago. He hadn’t come close to him, probably because he’d been watched the entire time. 

While he had no doubt that Roman wouldn’t try to leave him in here on purpose, his thoughts turned to his feeding habits. If he hadn’t fed in a while, he was more likely to be confused. Volatile. 

The exact kind of thing that Olivia would try to exploit for her advantage.

Peter hung his head. He couldn’t rely on Roman to get him out of here, could he? 

He looked back over toward the girl, who was watching him expectantly and unblinkingly. “Can these bars really not hold you?”

The girl crawled closer to the edge of her cage and rattled one of the bars with her hands. Although it seemed sturdy, Peter could hear the bolts becoming loose. “Does that answer your question?” 

Peter’s eyes flicked up to meet the girl’s gaze. “Full moon, we escape together.”

The girl laughed, high and cruel. “What makes you think I need you?”

“They took you, didn’t they? You spent all those months out there not getting caught, and this is the one place that’s managed to hold you,” Peter countered, feeling just a little impressed with himself for thinking of that argument so quickly. “You can try to escape, but they could just scoop you up and put you right back in a cage. Two of us, on the other hand…”

The girl smirked. “Interesting idea, little wolf.”

-

“I think it’s time for you to go home,” Olivia said when she stepped into her office that morning.

Roman had done a good job behaving himself, he thought. He’d made sure not to look anyone who came in to check on him in the eye for too long; he’d made pleasant conversation, and dare he say it, he’d even been kind of charming. 

The full moon was tomorrow - and whatever he needed to do to save Peter, he had to do it soon. He wasn’t sure if his heart still beat in his chest or if he was imagining things. 

“Why?” Roman asked, although he had schooled his expression into one of neutrality, and was forcing himself to keep his voice as even as possible. He knew that it was very possible that his mother would be able to sense fear - or perhaps, even make him confess to it himself.

“You’ve been through a lot, Roman,” Olivia’s expression was gentle, but Roman wouldn’t allow himself to be lulled into a false sense of security. Any amount of gentleness or compassion from Olivia was shrewd and calculated, and he wouldn’t allow himself to be fooled, especially when Peter was depending on him. 

“It’s time for you to go home.” Her tone was even, but strict and authoritative. Roman had to wonder if perhaps, he hadn’t needed to be on good behavior at all. Maybe all she wanted to do was make sure that he was nowhere near the White Tower for the full moon.

She stepped closer, although she still kept a healthy distance between the two of them. Maybe she thought that he might snap, just like he had when he’d refused to kill Peter and had turned his fangs on her instead. Roman let his hands hang down by his side and his shoulders relax. He wasn’t going to jump on the attack unless he had to.

“I’m worried about him,” he murmured, and Olivia gave him a smile.

“I know, darling, I know. But this is what’s best for us.” 

Those words made his blood - or Peter’s blood, because did he even have his own blood anymore? - boil in his veins. Maybe Olivia could smell it, he wasn’t sure. She walked with a cane every time he saw her, and it was hard for him to determine just how strong she was under Dr. Pryce’s care. 

“Okay,” Roman said, which made Olivia raise an exquisitely plucked eyebrow. “I’ll go home.” 

He watched Olivia carefully, but she didn’t let her guard down. She didn’t even seem to relax, standing there, one hand resting on top of her cane. 

As Roman turned to leave, he heard her say, “Don’t come back for him, darling.”

He faced her once more and forced a smile. “Don’t worry, I won’t.” 

This time, she didn’t seem to notice the lie.


	11. Little Wolf

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The vargulf rolled her eyes. “I don’t know why I’m bothering, little wolf. I could just eat you too.”

Every moment that Roman was home felt like a pinprick underneath his skin. He had only seen where Peter was being held for a brief moment, but that was more than enough. He didn’t want to think about what was happening to him when he wasn’t around. 

Shelley wasn’t there when he got home, and he’d found a note on the dining room table saying that she’d gone to Uncle Norman’s for a few days to comfort him. He apparently ‘wasn’t taking Letha’s passing very well.’

Well, he wasn’t either, but it was just one more tragedy in the long list that had come to define his life since he was four years old and had found his father wide-eyed and lying dead in a pool of his own blood. 

He took a deep breath. He had tried watching television to distract himself. He had tried getting high. He’d even drank half a bottle of expensive whiskey that he was pretty certain had been purchased before he was born. Not much seemed to work, and he found himself wondering why he had bothered to become upir when it meant that drinking and drugs didn’t feel like much of a change from sobriety. 

Jerking off hadn’t worked either, because as soon as he’d put his hand around his cock, his mind had gone to Peter. That wasn’t normally a problem, and indeed, Peter had been on his mind more often than he hadn’t after they’d met, but now it just made his mind wander to that cold, impersonal room in the White Tower, and to a small cage and chains. Then his cock would flag, he’d completely lose interest, and then he’d feel nothing but rage for his mother and the shithole of a town that seemed to be trying to pull them apart at every possible opportunity. 

He scrubbed a hand over his face and leaned back in the arm chair, cigarette hanging loosely between his fingers as he blew smoke up to the ceiling. He couldn’t remember the last time that he’d slept, and he couldn’t remember the last time that he’d really needed it, either.

Well, that wasn’t true. Every night when he and Peter had been together on the run, he’d been able to sleep. What did it say about him that the best sleep that he’d gotten in months was the sleep he’d gotten when he’d thought that he was on the run from the police? 

He sighed and got up from the chair, wandering over to pour himself another glass of whiskey. This time, he didn’t hold back and topped it off. The amount of alcohol that he drank now didn’t seem to matter, but that didn’t stop him from trying.

He had just settled back into his chair when there was a knock at the door. 

He could already feel horribly, ugly words about his mother–most of which his mother had already heard--bubbling up inside of him as he stalked toward the door. “I swear to God, I will rip your tongue out all over again,” he murmured under his breath, wondering if she could hear him on the other side of the door. 

When he opened the door, he blinked. Instead of his mother, it was Dr. Galina, Dr. Pryce’s assistant, who was standing in front of him. 

“May I come in?” 

He furrowed his brow. “You here to lock me up in the White Tower again?” 

Dr. Galina drew her lips into a tight line. “No, Mr. Godfrey. That’s not why I’m here.” 

Roman folded his arms across his chest. “Then why are you here?” 

“Can I come inside?” she asked, peering at a spot beyond his shoulder.

“Why?” Roman drew himself up to his full height, towering over her. 

“It’s about your friend.” 

Roman hated–no, despised--the fact that those words made him falter and move aside so that Dr. Galina could walk past him. She and Dr. Pryce were next on his list of people whose throats he wanted to rip out--after Olivia, of course, and here he was, letting her into his home because she’d reference Peter.

Not even called him by name, just referenced him. 

Somehow that made him feel weirdly pathetic.

He wandered over to the bar and decided that vodka was going to be the next thing that he was going to get not-drunk on. “Drink?” he asked, and she nodded, so he poured two, giving himself considerably more as he settled into a seat opposite her. 

“So what is it about Peter that you couldn’t say on the front door?”

Dr. Galina leaned forward, holding the glass of vodka delicately in her hands. “I was doing some research into the upir genome. That’s how Dr. Pryce came to know me. He was very interested in my anti-aging work.”

Roman quirked an eyebrow at her. “What makes you think I give a fuck about your anti-aging research?”

Dr. Galina took a delicate sip of her drink and gave him an amused look. “Oh, I know you don’t, but your mother does.”

Roman’s mind was already begin to spin with a thousand thoughts of needles and blood and Peter being held in a tiny cage for the rest of his life, simply because it was something that fucking Olivia of all people wanted. Fuck.

“So, what is it about this research that’s so important?” Roman asked, trying to tamp down the urge to punch a hole through a wall. The horrible thing was now he knew he actually could do some serious damage if he really wanted.

She swirled the contents of her glass for a moment. The sound of the ice clinking against the glass did nothing to tamp down the impulse to rip out her throat. Or drown out the sound of the blood snaking its way through her veins. Fuck, he really hadn’t eaten in a long time, had he? 

Peter was right, he was a risk when he was hungry. He’d try the steak in the fridge later to see if it took any of the edge off. 

“It doesn’t work,” she said cleanly, drawing her jaw tight. “I worked for years with upir across Eastern Europe.” 

Roman raised an eyebrow. “I still have no idea what you’re talking about.” 

Dr. Galina let out an exasperated and impatient sigh as she set her glass down on the table next to them. “Your mother was very sick after you bit her, Roman. She is still sick, and she will die within the year if she is not given some kind of antidote.” 

Roman shrugged. “That doesn’t sound that bad to me.” 

He watched her carefully for a moment, wondering if she would react to his statement, but she simply pressed on. “I have met upir before who age. Most age extremely, extremely slowly. You can barely even tell, but it’s still happening. Each and every one of them eventually died after being given werewolf blood. Dr. Pryce is not as pessimistic as I am that this trend will not continue.”

Roman stared at her blankly. “What is your point, then?” Honestly, the fact that his mother could possibly die if she was injected with werewolf blood didn’t exactly sound like the most unappealing prospect to him. 

“My point,” Dr. Galina clenched her jaw again. “Is that there isn’t any good scientific reason for your friend to be in the White Tower right now. And I can help you get him back.” 

“What do you want for it?”

“Two million.”

“Get the fuck out of my house.” 

Dr. Galina seemed completely unphased by his outburst. “It’s not your house, not yet, Roman. And if you think that you’re going to be able to get into the White Tower without my help, then you are...” She trailed off and muttered something in Russian that made Roman quirk an eyebrow at her. 

“Fine, I’ll get you your money.” 

Dr. Galina smiled. For a very brief and bizarre moment, he was almost reminded of the sweet and razor sharp way that Letha would smile when she was on her way to getting something that she wanted. 

“Very well, Roman. Then we are in business.” 

-

The night of a full moon never failed to make Peter feel as though he was vibrating out of his skin.

But that feeling was even worse now--he could practically feel every tiny movement that his heart was making to push blood throughout his body.

He glanced over at the vargulf. He had no way to know if he could trust her, but he had no way to know if Roman was coming back, either. 

And there was no way in hell that he was going to stay in that cage.

He took a deep breath and tried to center himself.

“You’re wondering if you’re close to changing,” the vargulf said with an air of disinterest.

“I know I’m getting close,” Peter grunted, scrubbing a hand over his face.

“Hmm,” the vargulf hummed. “Yeah, no. I have a theory that all these lights make it harder to go with the moon.”

“What?” Maybe it was the sleep deprivation, but the words the vargulf had spoken quickly floated in one ear and out the other.

The vargulf rolled her eyes. “I don’t know why I’m bothering, little wolf. I could just eat you too.” 

“Are you saying that our sense of time is being thrown off in here?”

“Yup,” she said, popping the ‘p’ when she did. “Well, for you, at least. I’m not waiting for the moon to be able to change.” 

Peter let out a sigh and sat back in the cage. It was hard for him to tell if the vargulf was trying to mess with him, or if it was really true that the lights were throwing off his sense of time. Why would these people want him to change at a different time?

Unless, maybe, they were trying to trigger it earlier? Maybe they’d been trying to trigger it since the day (how long ago that was, he frankly had no idea anymore) that he and Roman had been forced to return to Hemlock Grove.

“Does it really matter what they want, little wolf? I can see your thoughts in your head, you know. Can see you thinking. You and me, we’re different from them. We’re better. Don’t waste your damn time.” 

In a weird way, the vargulf was right. The man who had stood above his cage had said something about ‘genome’ and ‘secrets’, but to be honest, he hadn’t understood what he was talking about--and the more time that he spent in that cage, he had a feeling that he really, really didn’t want to stick around to find out. 

“Are you going to kill them?” 

“They deserve it, don’t you think?”

He couldn’t really argue with that--he was just sick of death and ripped open bodies and intestines and blood. So much blood. He never told Roman, but sometimes when he closed his eyes, he could see Clementine Chasseur’s exposed muscles and oxygenated blood. 

“I just want to get out of here,” Peter said simply.

“That’s not a no,” the vargulf grinned, wide, feral, and toothy.  
“Does it matter?”

The vargulf shrugged. “I guess it would just be nice to hear you admit what you are, little wolf.” 

Peter shuddered.

-

“Are you sure about this?” 

Dr. Galina’s plan was to go in through the front door at 6 p.m., because at that point, Godfrey Industries would have mostly emptied out for the day, and people like Pryce, who worked overnight either by choice (in Pryce’s case) or because they were required to, were on break for dinner. 

It seemed so simple in comparison. Roman’s initial plan to break into the White Tower’s laboratory space was to hypnotize an employee that had access. He’d so far had a moderate amount of success when trying to hypnotize people on command, after all. Of course, his ability got harder to control when he was hungry, he would have had no way to immediately know if his victim had the clearance that he needed, and even as he was standing right next to Dr. Galina, he could practically feel her blood singing to him. 

“Of course,” Dr. Galina shrugged. “I have a very high clearance, nobody is going to bother us.” 

“What if someone asks why I’m being let back into the building?” 

She smirked at him. “Roman, I believe that would be something that would be easy for you to take care of on your own, no?” 

He nodded, a blush creeping up his neck at the implication. He wasn’t used to someone besides Peter knowing what he was capable of, and within the past day and a half, thinking of Peter led his mind to hesitant kisses in a shitty motel room in Tennessee. Or was it Kentucky? His memory was going hazy and fuzzy at the edges. He was going to have to eat soon. 

When Dr. Galina swiped her badge at the front entrance of the White Tower, she gestured for Roman to follow behind her. He did so, eyes wide and trying to take in as much detail as possible so that he would be prepared to act at a moment’s notice. 

The security guard stood up when he entered the building. “He’s not supposed to be in here.” 

Roman licked his lips and met his eyes. “Yes, I am.” 

It didn’t take as much effort as he thought it would to push into the man’s mind and rearrange his thoughts, but as soon as he had forced him to say, “Yes, you do” he found that the urge to rip out his throat was rising. 

Fuck, he could practically see the blood in his veins. 

Dr. Galina must have noticed that he was dumbstruck, wondering what it would be like to have a mouthful of the security guard’s carotid artery, and grabbed his arm to urge him to keep moving.

He just narrowly avoided sinking his teeth into her instead.

“Breathe,” he told himself as he followed her. 

“That was good,” she murmured, “just try not to attract attention to yourself. Look down more.” 

Roman obeyed her instructions. Keeping his eyes on the floor didn’t make him feel any better, especially when the halls of Godfrey Industries were a blinding white that seemed to blur together in his memory. He had spent countless hours inside the White Tower, and yet, he had a hard time knowing exactly where they were at the moment and probably wouldn’t have if it weren’t for Dr. Galina’s whispered commands to turn left or right or continue straight every few minutes. 

“He should be in here,” Dr. Galina said finally, bringing them to a stop in front of a heavily secured door--the same door that she’d led him through when he’d said that he wanted to see the lab. 

She swiped her id card and ushered him in behind her. The door quickly snapped shut behind him, and left him wondering what would have happened if he’d been any slower to follow. 

Roman wasn’t prepared for what he saw next.

-

“Don’t fight it, little wolf.”

“Is it time? I don’t know if it’s time yet.” Sweat was beginning to run down Peter’s brow. He squeezed his eyes shut in an effort to hold on as long as he could--but already he could feel his human face slipping. 

“There you go,” the vargulf said approvingly as Peter gasped and began to change. “There you go.” 

-

There were two shifted werewolves in front of them. One he easily recognized as Peter--the other, a white wolf that he assumed must have been the vargulf. 

One time on the road, Roman had gotten up the courage to ask what upir smelled like to werewolves. While Peter had equivocated and tried to dodge the question, he had eventually admitted that while it varied, depending on the upir and the wolf, it generally wasn’t the best smell. 

“So what do I smell like to you then?” he’d asked.

“Moth balls, Godfrey.” 

It was so ridiculous that he hadn’t been able to stop himself from laughing.

So really, in retrospect, it wasn’t surprising that Dr. Galina hadn’t stood much of a chance. 

The vargulf pounced on her and before she could scream, tore her neck clean out. The coppery smell of blood filled his nose, and even though he knew that they only had a short amount of time to escape the White Tower, he did pause to look at the wound. The vargulf really had left nothing but skin behind.

He hated the fact that he wasn’t even disgusted by it. 

Roman picked up Dr. Galina’s ID badge, and motioned for Peter to follow him. “Come on, we have to go.” Peter had seemed to understand human speech when he’d seen him shift, and he hoped that that was still the case.

He couldn’t lose Peter here. He refused.

He swiped Dr. Galina’s badge. The doors opened again, and Peter followed after him. He would have been perfectly happy to leave the vargulf locked inside with Dr. Galina’s corpse, because at least then, maybe it wouldn’t hurt anyone else. 

But it was faster than he’d predicted, and as soon as they were back in the hallway, it leapt for him. 

Peter was quick to push it back, teeth sinking into the vargulf’s white fur. But the vargulf wasn’t going to go down easily, and quickly dug its claws into Peter’s back. 

“Stop!” Roman shouted, the fact that he wasn’t supposed to call attention to himself completely forgotten. “Get away from him!”

He tried to wrench the vargulf off of Peter, but it was difficult when it seemed to be so much stronger than Peter was in his werewolf form. 

There was so much blood that for a moment, Roman wondered if it had actually killed him. 

A dart flew out of nowhere, embedding itself in the vargulf’s matted fur. Roman only looked down at it for a second, but even in that moment he could tell that it wasn’t breathing anymore. Without thinking, Roman scooped Peter up into his arms. He wasn’t going to let him share the vargulf’s fate.

“Come on Peter, we’re getting out of here.”


	12. Blood and Skin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “We’re going to get out of here,” Roman murmured into his fur. “Please, it’s going to be okay.”

Roman had never been particularly athletic (unless fucking his way through the cheerleading squad at his high school somehow counted), but he instinctively knew that he’d be able to scoop Peter up into his arms and carry him. His body was stronger now, and carrying Peter over a long distance barely phased him. 

His blood–or the blood of whoever or whatever he had last fed on--was pounding in his ears. “I’m going to get you out of here, Peter,” he murmured to the wolf in his arms. Peter occasionally wriggled around, but he didn’t let go. He wasn’t letting go of Peter ever again.

Especially not when he was running through the White Tower, adrenaline and stress making it difficult for him to remember exactly how he and Dr. Galina had gotten down to this floor. He was really regretting not breaking her rules and looking around more now. 

“We’re going to get out of here,” Roman murmured into his fur. “Please, it’s going to be okay.” 

After the third left that he’d taken, a dart--not unlike the one that had knocked out Peter when they’d gone to the Godfrey Steel Mill--whizzed past. Since Peter was in his arms, it was easier for him to move both of them out of the way and avoid it. 

“It’s okay, you’re going to be fine. We’re going to get out of here. I have you,” he repeated over and over again. Peter seemed to understand him, and whined in his arms. 

A few seconds later, he realized that it wasn’t just that Peter wanted to try and respond to him and couldn’t. 

It was that he was hurt. 

The dart hadn’t embedded itself in his skin, but blood was beginning to matte Peter’s fur and stain his shirt. It was hard for him to tell just how bad the injury was--or if the wound had been infected with something that was potentially lethal.

“Shit,” he looked over his shoulder, trying to see where it had come from, but he couldn’t immediately see anything out of the ordinary. Maybe they had managed to avoid it? Maybe they would finally get out of here in (mostly) one piece?

“Hello, Roman.”

Fuck.

There was Olivia, standing proudly in front of a door that led to a staircase that would lead to the outside world. 

“I’m surprised to see you here,” Roman said nonchalantly, as though he wasn’t stealing her own personal pet project out from under her. “Isn’t it more your style to try and send someone else to do your dirty work?”

Olivia shrugged. “He was out to dinner with some important funders. I didn’t want to call him away.” 

“How nice of you,” Roman deadpanned. Olivia shrugged. 

“I don’t know what you’ve been up to this evening, Roman, but it has to stop, now.”

“Really?” Roman spat. “You were planning on keeping people locked up here without telling their families.” He knew that the Godfrey money was capable of making a lot of things disappear, but he absolutely refused to believe that Lynda and Destiny and Peter’s entire family would just sit by and let him be held hostage by his mother inside of the White Tower. 

“He’s going home. I am too.” He wasn’t sure what he meant by home, since he was very much not going to be returning to the Godfrey Manor now. He hoped that Shelley would be able to understand. Maybe she would. Peter needed him, and he needed him too. Fuck, he needed him more than life itself, and he’d already proven that to be true. 

“It’s such a shame,” Olivia murmured, each tap of her cane reverberating throughout Roman’s entire body. “I really don’t want to have to hurt you, darling.”

Olivia is a predator, and the way that she’s looking at him now, he has no doubt that she could kill him if she really wanted to. 

“You don’t have to do anything,” Roman pointed out, holding Peter close to his chest. “You could just let us leave instead. Do something good for once in your miserable life.” 

Olivia chuckled to herself. “Everything that I’ve done, darling, I’ve done for you. He was here for you, darling. Not just me. He would have been able to help you. Ensure that your legacy lives on forever.”

The image that it called to mind was enough to make Roman feel sick to his stomach. He was beginning to understand the depths of the pull that he felt toward Peter, but the idea of keeping Peter alive for the sole purpose of keeping himself alive made him want to vomit. He’d rather be dead--permanently, this time--than subject Peter to a half-existence.

“No,” he shook his head. “That’s what you want for your legacy. It’s not what I want for mine.” 

There were times since he’d changed that he had felt like he was little more than a human-sized leech, and it was only because of Peter that he ever felt any different. Peter understood what it was like to feel like you didn’t matter because you were less than fully human. Olivia, on the other hand, seemed to have given herself to inhumanity a long time ago.

Roman tilted his jaw upward, giving Olivia a challenging look. “You’re going to let us go. You’re not going to come after us anymore. You’re going to forget that you ever saw us. That you ever even knew either of us.”

Olivia smirked at him. “I have lived for hundreds of years as an upir, Roman. You have lived as one for what...three weeks? You can’t get inside my mind.” She scoffed, and stepped closer. Roman took a step back. 

“You know what the right thing to do is, Roman,” she said, when she stopped in front of him, resting her hands on her cane, perfectly poised and ready to strike. 

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure I do,” he countered, head held high as his mind tried to come up with another route out of the Tower. Preferably one that wouldn’t end with him in another coma or Peter back in that awful cage in that awful room. 

He had expected to make another attempt to compel Olivia to step aside--he’d even expected to tear her throat out a second time. Despite the fact that she still seemed to be as powerful as ever, Dr. Galina had told her just how weak she was. This time, if he ripped her throat out, she might actually die. And permanently.

As it turned out, he ended up needing to neither of those things, because Peter, despite the injury on his leg--leapt out of his arms with the kind of speed that Roman had only been able to achieve the night that he’d turned.

He pounced on Olivia with such force that she hadn’t had time to call for help, and sunk his teeth into her neck. 

Olivia gasped wetly, blood spurting out of the wound. But Peter didn’t stop, he dug his claws into her face and began pulling at the skin there. Roman stayed rooted to the spot as he watched his mother slowly become completely unrecognizable before his eyes.

And he had never, in the entire time that he’d known Peter, loved him more. 

“Peter,” he breathed, and the wolf trotted over to him obediently. He buried his face in his fur, breathing in the smell of blood. “Peter, we have to go now. This time, I don’t think we’re going to be coming back.” 

And when Roman looked into the depths of those glowing eyes--eyes that quite belong to Peter completely--he could tell that he understood.


	13. Something Better

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> And maybe, after spending their time surrounded by tragedy in Hemlock Grove, they deserved something better.

The first thing that Peter noticed when he woke up was that he was wearing different clothes.

His head was pounding as he pulled back the comforter and looked down at himself. He furrowed his brow. He remembered the vargulf, and the shift, and then....frankly, his memory had gone a bit hazy around the edges. He didn’t usually lose memories to the shift, and it seemed like the harder he tried to get them back, to claw at them, the more the memories remained completely out of reach.

“Oh good,” he heard Roman before he saw him. “You’re awake.”

“What the hell happened?” Peter asked, rubbing his temples. “I was in The White Tower and then...what happened to the vargulf? How did we get out?” Those were much more pressing questions than ‘where the hell are we?’ although Peter had a feeling that he was about to get to that in short order. 

“The vargulf is dead,” Roman said plainly as he sat down next to Peter. “And so is my mother.” 

“Jesus,” Peter breathed. “Did I?”

For a moment, Roman was caught off guard. Whatever it was that Peter had been hit with while they were in The White Tower had clearly not been lethal, but it must have messed with his memory. How could he even begin to fill in the blanks?

He furrowed his brow and took a deep breath.

“No, you didn’t kill anyone.”

He could see the way that Peter’s shoulders relaxed, and he knew that he had made the right choice. 

-

It took Roman two days to tell Peter about Letha. It didn’t seem right to when he’d been waiting to see if he would wake up to begin with. They’d already been through so much in a short period of time that he didn’t want to add to it, either. 

But when Peter asked for his phone so he could text Letha, his stomach dropped. 

“She’s dead.”

Peter didn’t talk to him for three days, after that. 

-

It’s torture, having Peter not talk to him. But Roman is used to cold, silent rooms and chilly affection, so it doesn’t bother him as much as it might have otherwise. Peter doesn’t leave after he tells him about Letha, and as far as he’s concerned, that’s a victory. 

-

On the last of the three days, Peter held his hands in a tender and loving way that he hadn’t been expecting. “I’m sorry.”

“I know you loved her.”

It’s more biting and acidic than he’d wanted it to be. Peter raised an eyebrow at him. “Are you jealous?” 

It was the first time that they’d gotten close to talking about what had happened between them in that roadside motel room. 

“Yeah,” Roman breathed. “Kind of.” 

He locked away a memory in his head - one where he saw Peter and Letha through the windows of the Rumanceks’ trailer, and one where he took what he wanted from Ashley Valentine for the sole purpose of consoling himself.

Peter never had to know.

Peter wasn’t going to have to know. 

Peter leaned in and brushed his lips against his. 

And for the first time in a month--or well, perhaps the second time--they allowed themselves a moment that belonged to them and them alone.

Roman grasped the edge of Peter’s shirt and lifted it over his head, breaking the kiss to pepper teasing kisses along his jaw, along his chest, and this time, when Peter shucked off his pants, Roman went even further, mouthing his way down from his cock to his inner thigh and settling on his hole.

Peter had panted and groaned the last time they’d done this, but now, now, he was writhing and practically screaming.

Roman wanted the moment to last forever. 

-

“What about my mom? Destiny?” Peter asked when Roman curled up against him. 

“You can call them if you want,” Roman shrugged. His heart felt like it had stopped in his chest. He was a coward, he thought. He couldn’t even begin to explain to Peter why going back to Hemlock Grove was a bad idea. 

Would Peter have lied to him like this?

Frankly, he hoped so. 

-

Destiny is the one who tells Peter about Olivia’s death. The body of Christina Wendall was also found at The White Tower, and the Hemlock Grove police have pieced together a theory that both of them were attacked by an animal that had been genetically modified by Godfrey Industries. Without Olivia there, the story has begun to stick, and there are rumors that the Godfrey fortune might soon dry up dealing with a class-action lawsuit by the staff who worked there. 

Roman thought the whole thing sounded incredibly boring, and frankly, the money was immaterial to him. It could have been that he’d always had so much of it that it had never mattered, but now, now it felt like an opportunity to forge his own path.

Create his own legacy.

“Are you sure that you’re not upset about your mom?” Peter asked, and Roman scoffed. 

“Not even a little bit. She was a horrible cunt. Even more horrible to Shelley than she was to me.” He was grateful that Shelley, last he’d heard, was living with their Uncle Norman. He’d always treated her with the kindness that she deserved.   
-

It’s only when they’re over the border into Georgia that Peter asked him.

“Did you lie when you said that I didn’t kill anyone?”

Roman gripped the steering wheel harder than necessary. “No, I wasn’t lying.” 

Peter tutted to himself. “Did you know that werewolves can smell lies?”

Roman gulped. Later he’d wonder why he felt more afraid in that moment than he had facing down Olivia in The White Tower. “Fine, I am lying.”

Despite the implication of the lie, Peter looked amused. “Fuck, Godfrey, I could tell you anything about werewolves and you would believe it, wouldn’t you?” 

-

Peter wasn’t quiet when he told him about Olivia. Instead, he wrapped his arms around him and squeezed tightly. 

“I’m sorry,” he murmured, and Roman felt so warm and comfortable and loved that he barely had the energy to tell him that he had absolutely nothing to feel sorry for. 

-

They’re at another motel–this time, just outside of Austin--when Peter asked him another question. 

“Do you think we’re ever going to go back?”

Roman swallowed hard. “I don’t think so,” he muttered under his breath so quietly that Peter had to strain to hear him. 

Peter bit his lip and wandered over to the window. “Destiny thinks it would be safe to go back, and so does my mom but...” He let out a breath and turned to face Roman. “There’s nothing there anymore.” 

Roman felt a flare of jealousy, wondering if Peter was thinking of Letha and her perfect blonde hair and her angelic everything--but Peter wandered close to him, cupping his face to press a firm kiss against his lips. 

“You can’t get that way every time Letha is on my mind,” Peter said softly, before he pressed another kiss against his lips. “Like she will come back from the dead to replace you.” 

Roman’s first instinct was to say that he wasn’t thinking about Letha or jealous of her. His next was to ask how Peter knew that he couldn’t be replaced--why he felt something for him--because he knew the exact moment that his need to be Peter’s friend had metamorphized into love. 

“Stop thinking, Roman,” he murmured. “You’re thinking too much. We deserve to both be here, right now.”

And maybe, after spending their time surrounded by tragedy in Hemlock Grove, they deserved something better.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for updating so fast, but I'm full of anticipation to get to the end. Thank you to everyone who has supported the fic or even just clicked on it. Love you all. <3


	14. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter does not have to be read, in my opinion, to get the full experience of the fic. Consider it something of a preview for a sequel I am considering (which is a crossover with Chilling Adventures of Sabrina).

California didn’t look anything like Hemlock Grove, which was a relief. Roman had spent what money he had to get them there, and to get them an apartment. Bouncing between motel to motel had been far more exciting (or possibly just terrifying, he had a tendency to confuse the two) when it had meant that they could possibly be arrested by the police for the murders in Hemlock Grove. Now, with Olivia gone and nothing at their backs, sleeping on creaky mattresses in rooms that smelled like dust and old smoke had lost some of the romanticism. 

Peter had already gotten a job at a garage several blocks from their apartment. He’d have to get one soon too, he thought. While the class action suit had taken several million dollars out of the Godfrey family fortune, there was still money left, not including the money that was tied up in the Manor. If he sold it, they’d probably have enough to live for a year or a year and a half, depending on how frugal they were.

But the last thing that he wanted was for Olivia to have any impact on his new life.

He sighed and exhaled smoke out of their open window. They technically weren’t supposed to smoke in their apartment, but that was one conscenion that he wasn’t open to making. If he had to compel the leasing office to not care about it, he would do it. 

Peter had reminded him on many occasions that his powers were for important things, like making sure that no one from their old life that they didn’t want speaking to them spoke to them. It wasn’t for making sure that they could break their lease agreement. 

But, as Roman had reminded him on numerous occasions, smoking was important to him. It was just about one of the last things that made him feel anything. He couldn’t get drunk, he couldn’t get high, but he did feel nice and warm whenever he smoked, almost as warm as he did when he drank Peter’s blood. 

Every bite mark that he left on Peter was a source of guilt, even though Peter had also repeatedly reminded him that he was the one who had suggested feeding on him. They’d tried spacing out his feedings even more, but that rarely helped. He just got hungrier after a week spent eating raw, bloody steaks. It was never as good as the real thing. 

Idly, he had wondered if it was possible that now the only thing that he could get drunk on was Peter’s blood. 

He flicked ash out the window as he stared down at the street. He quite liked California, he decided. He liked the colorful buildings and he liked living close to the ocean. It was cool, but it wasn’t dark and wet like Hemlock Grove was. 

It didn’t feel like there were monsters in every corner. It didn’t feel like they were waiting for tragedy anymore.

He squinted, staring out at the blue sky, wondering if maybe it was possible to see the ocean from their apartment. Peter didn’t think so, but his senses weren’t enhanced all the time. Maybe if he concentrated hard enough, he’d be able to see it. 

That was when Roman felt like he was being watched.

He was so used to the feeling–in Hemlock Grove, it felt like the goddamn trees were watching you--that he almost didn’t notice it.

His eyes traveled down to see a woman in a red cloak staring up at him. She was short and had short blonde hair, but he couldn’t really make out her face. Enhanced senses his ass.

And as soon as he saw her, she vanished.

He leaned back, resting on the floor as he blew smoke rings toward the ceiling. Maybe he hadn’t really seen anything--he and Peter had both spent a lot of time trying to outrun the monsters that lurked in the dark. 

-

When Peter came home, the first thing that Roman did was drag him over the threshold, and drop to his knees.

Usually Peter didn’t stop him, but today, today was different. He couldn’t always read Peter, but he could read that in his eyes. He blinked as he looked up at him. 

“There was a woman at the garage. She was blonde and wore a red cloak. I went to go and ask her if she needed something, but then she just....disappeared.” Peter scrubbed a hand over his face. “I haven’t been able to get it out of my head.”

Any disappointment that Roman felt quickly evaporated as he scrambled to his feet. “I saw her too. Right outside the apartment.” 

Peter furrowed his brow and let out a sigh. Roman knew that he had plenty of nightmares. He slept so much more than he did, and every time he said something in his sleep, Roman remembered it and filed it away for later. He hadn’t said Letha’s name in his sleep for a week, for example. Lately, most of what he said was about blood. 

And frankly, the last thing that he wanted to do was talk about the moment that Peter had protected them--him. 

“You don’t have to talk about it,” Roman said gently. He couldn’t sleep off his own nightmares, but he had sure been trying as hard as he could to be able to smoke them out. 

Peter shrugged. “I thought she was like...a...”

“....nightmare?” Roman supplied, and Peter nodded.

“But, I think she was real.”

-

Each of them see the woman three more times that week. She seems to always be watching them, and waiting for something. 

“I tried to talk to her today,” Peter said, as Roman ran his fingers through his hair. “But she just disappeared again.” 

Roman hummed to himself. He could sense the question on the tip of Peter’s tongue, and the last thing that he wanted was to be talking about whoever this woman was anymore. 

He leaned down and kissed him instead.

And for the moment, it was forgotten. 

-

“Do you believe in witches?”

“Fuck no.”

“I’m a werewolf and you’re an upir and you draw the line at witches. Okay.”

-

Weird stuff starts happening. 

It’s not their usual level of weird either--vargulfs and centuries-old upir trying to do everything that they can in a desperate bid to stay alive.

It’s more sci-fi weird, Roman decided.

One day, he leaves their apartment, comes back, and there’s a different number on their front door. 

Then, the garage where Peter works, randomly changes streets. Randomly, Peter says, like there was a deliberate way that he could have gone to work one day where his job had always been and just find it not there, as if it had never been there to begin with. 

The day that Peter draws the line, however, is the day when he notices that all of his contacts on his phone have disappeared. 

-

“We have to go back.”

“I’m not going back to that shithole.”

-

There was truly nothing more that Roman hated in this entire world than Peter ignoring him. Nothing. He’d go and live with Olivia all over again (if that bitch was alive, which thankfully, she definitely, definitely wasn’t) if it meant that Peter wouldn’t ignore him. 

“There is nothing for us there,” Roman said one day, which was definitely the wrong thing, because this just made Peter more determined to ignore him. 

-

It was around day five that Roman broke, and pulled Peter in close. 

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.” 

Peter sighed. “I just want to know that my mom and Destiny are okay. Hemlock Grove doesn’t have very much for them either, but I just...” He trailed off and shook his head. How did he even begin to explain that his mom and Destiny still being there and Hemlock Grove having nothing left for him personally weren’t the same thing? 

“Do you remember their numbers? Maybe we can call them and see if they’re okay,” Roman offered, pressing a gentle kiss against Peter’s forehead. He nodded. 

And that was when the television--which was on in the background--caught Roman’s attention. 

The crawl at the bottom of the screen said, ‘Towns Across America Disappear.’ 

Hemlock Grove was at the top of the list.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the first time I have ever, in my entire life, finished a chaptered fic. I want to thank everyone (again) who has supported it. Y'all are superstars. I hope you enjoyed the ride as much as I did. <3


End file.
